The Ones that Failed
by Clar the Pirate
Summary: If you think about the number of coincidences that string your average fairy tale together it's a wonder that any manage to succeed. But for the moment let's forget about them, because these are the ones that failed.
1. Perfume

_Kia ora,_

_This series has grown and developed beyond anything I expected when I first came up with the idea of sticking three stories which didn't end as they were supposed to (and that I didn't think were particularly well written) into a series in the hope that quantity would allow people to overlook quality. A few years later, and a couple of these stories are some of the best I've written, go figure. _

_The FAILeds are not unified by genre, tone, theme, or even narrative style – the only thing which binds them is the fact that they don't turn out the same way as the original fairy tales they are based on (except for the one that does). So I thought I might add a contents list here to give new-comers a better idea of what they're getting themselves into._

_1._ **Perfume** _Beauty and the Beast; angsty, aloof in tone with a really annoying narrative voice_

_2._ **Waking Up**_ Sleeping Beauty; a quiet not-quite-perhaps tragedy_

_3._ **She Left on a Monday**_ Cinderella; a comedy of manners and pride, dialogue-heavy_

_4. _**Frankly, My Dear** _BatB; a frank comedy and the beginning of the Franklin Epic_

_5._ **Daddy Dearest**_ BatB; the vainglorious ramblings of a drunken sot, chronologically set before Frankly_

_6._ **Despite Appearances**_ Dazzling Falcon Finister (East of the Moon); a quiet one_

_7._ **I Don't Give a Damn**_ Golden Curls and How She Slept (Bluebeard); Franklin the Second_

_8._ **Perfect**_ Cinderella; first-person, light-hearted, very cute and chatty_

_9. _**Digressions** _Snow White; of signifiers, thoughts, and words, one of my very favourites_

_10. _**The Fairy Tale of the Third Assistant of J. Alfred Prufrock**_ Sleeping Beauty; nice and pedestrian_

_11._ **Iron Shoes**_ Dazzling Falcon Finister; girl-power, another favourite_

_12._ **The Nature of the Beast**_ BatB; implications of child abuse, neither happy nor easy_

_13._ **Sky Blue**_ Snow White; überly cute and happy to make up for the previous_

_14._ **In the Tradition of Lear**_ BatB; high-stakes and a little bit full of itself, not a tragedy_

_15._ **Best Kept**_ The Frog Prince; at once very sweet and unbearably tragic_

_16._ **Farewell, My Lovely**_ Roses and Coal; an experiment in pulp fiction, highest concentrate of narrative detail_

_17._ **29**_ Twelve Dancing Princesses; about tragedy and the media and real life_

_18._ **The Importance of Being Maniacal**_ Rapunzel; great with muffins_

_19._ **About My Bad Reputation**_ Jack and the Beanstalk(ish); the third instalment of the Franklin Epic_

_20._ **I am Learning to Abandon the World**_ Sleeping Beauty; tendancies towards the poetic, but short_

_21._ **Her Eyes were Green** _Beauty and the Beast_; _epistological, mostly, not so comic_

_22. _**Silence and Other Love Poems **_The Six Swans; just about the worst thing I've ever done to a character_

_23._ **Dulce et Decorum Est** _Twelve Dancing Princesses; war is hell_

_24. _**The Bloody Chamber**_ Bluebeard; a story about stories, particularly Gothic ones_

_25. _**Beauty and**_ Beauty and the Beast; vaguely written around 'Gracie' by Bic Runga_

_26. _**Oh No, Not** **Me **_Jack and the Beanstalk(ish); Franklin goes fourth_

_27. _**Central**_ Rapunzel; a story about home_

_28. _**Love Shook My Heart** _BatB; pro-rainbow but hopefully not preachy_**_  
_**

_29._ **song of the open road** _Dazzling Falcon Finister; a sequel-ish to Iron Shoes written on tumblr_**  
**

* * *

**Perfume**

The house she passed each day had once been her own. I mention this only so that you will understand why she was so at home among the roses.

She passed the house when walking to and from the market. To market she carried a large wicker basket and at the market she would fill it each day with milk, butter, cheese, eggs, meat, and perhaps a fruit tart. I mention this only so that you will understand why it was no small matter to stand half an hour, with the heavy basket on one arm, smelling the roses.

She stopped to smell the roses each and every single day without fail. I mention this only so that you will understand that she loved the roses with all her heart.

Smelling roses is no simple act; she understood this. It is a multi-sensorial experience; I hope you know this.

First is the sight of roses: frothy white, innocent pink, blithe yellow, and red – red that glows with inner warmth and tattoos itself to the insides of eyelids. Reds were her favourite.

Second is the smell of roses: the tracery of scent on the air, permeating but subtle. A delicate come-hither to the knowledgeable lover until their nose is pressed deep in its petals and it invades their lungs, their body, their mind, and their soul.

Third, and most important to her, is the feel of roses. No, no, no. I would beg a little more elegance than to begin homilies on beauty bearing thorns (all ye be warned). A true appreciator of roses knows its thorns and is never pricked. She was never pricked.

No, no, no. The feeling I speak of, that she loved, is of the roses' soft flesh against the nose. A stranger touch but welcoming. Tickling, gentling, loving – odd and yet a caress she could not do without.

So she stopped and smelt her roses every day for half an hour at the house where once she had lived because she loved them.

But then her father's fortunes declined still further and she had to retire to the country far from her roses. The village she came to live in was famed for its sunflowers – brash flowers with no scent at all. So when her father asked what he might bring her from town and his returned ship, she replied without hesitation _a rose_.

For weeks she waited and weeks again, longing for her rose. And the sunflowers filled the air with smells of absence.

Then one day, her father was there again – a cold, white-sky day. He smiled at her, pleased their separation had ended, and handed her a small glass bottle with a golden cap.

He explained, "It is winter, dearest, roses don't grow in the winter. So I bought you an ounce of rose perfume; I didn't think it would make a difference."

She replied, smiling, "No. Thank you, father."

Fortunately, her father never thought to check if she used his present.

Because what she had meant was _of course it does_.

* * *

_There's this rose garden I pass on my way home._


	2. Waking Up

**Waking Up**

I tipped my head to one side and hugged my knees a little bit closer. He fascinated me, this prince.

But staring at him was only making him more nervous so I politely considered the room instead of his pale face. It was much the same as it was a hundred years ago. Only dustier, with briars creeping in the windows. I was not dusty, for which I was grateful; I had terrible asthma as a child. Which I still was, really. It didn't feel strange - perhaps it should have when so much time had passed, but it didn't. My favourite painting, of melting clocks, that hung beside the door opposite my bed had faded to an indeterminate, yellowy-red nothing.

The prince took a deep breath which I took as my cue to notice him again. He was not quite handsome nor dashing but he was nice-looking; the sort of person I would liked to have met if I had not been cursed with enchantment.

He cleared his throat, painfully. "Ah- princess."

It seemed as good a beginning as any and yet he was not satisfied and began again. "Princess, I would . . ."

"My name is Briar. Like the plant that scratched you." I traced a scar down the inside of his wrist and he flinched. It was not from the briars, I knew that. It was old and pale not new and red; I just wanted to touch him once.

"It's not- I am Tristam." The fact did not make him happy. "Princ- Briar, I should tell you, I am not- I do not . . ."

From where I sat in my bed I could look out the north window of my room. I did so as I said, "You do not want to claim waking me, to marry me, or to rule a country." He sat on the opposite end of my bed, very still. "There are bones in my briars, and bodies. What manner of man walks into a corpse of thorns that holds so much death?"

Tristam coughed. "A man madly in love? A man who would risk everything to save another?" he suggested.

I considered again his pale face. "No. You have sad eyes."

"Princ- Briar."

"You may be madly in love, but not with me. You walked into the arms of Death, welcomed its barbed embrace." He closed his sad eyes against me. "You did not mean to succeed."

I hesitated. Paused. Waited. Then finally, "Tell me."

He turned to look out the window but saw further still, to his own land and home. "Her name is Liliana. She loves my brother and he is going to marry her."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes."

"Well," I clapped my hands together to shake him from his reverie. "You should go now. Before anyone else wakes, before they realise you woke me." He took long, slow moments to stir.

"Are you certain- I could ..."

"No, Tristam, I want nothing from you. Go. I would wish you good health and life, but I suppose ... you wouldn't appreciate it?"

I made him smile, I remember that very clearly. It was not a very sure smile but it existed.

"Princess," he said as he lifted one of my hands to his lips and kissed its fingertips lightly. The feeling lingered.

"Briar."

He smiled again and I knew nothing more could ever come of it. "Thank you."

I married the man my parents had chosen for me before I slipped into enchanted slumber – a duke who fortunately had been in the castle that day and fallen asleep too. He was strong and sure, not always nice but kindly enough in his way. We ruled my country well for many years and our son has a son of his own to succeed him.

Tristam fascinated me but he was not the love of my life; I am not madly in love with him, I was not. Perhaps if we had met in a different time, in a different place. Or if he had kissed me just once more.


	3. She Left on a Monday

**She Left on a Monday**

The morning after, the king, queen, and prince had brunch together in the blue saloon. The queen considered her son over the top of a warm buttered crumpet; the prince gazed calmly back. With instincts similar to those of a dog before an earthquake, the king piled his plate high with food, began eating, and refused to be drawn into anything. The ensuing conversation went like this:

"It was a very pleasant evening last night."

"Quite the success on your part, ma'am. People will be talking of it for years to come."

"One does try–"

"No, ma'am. _Others_ try; you, I have found, invariably succeed."

The queen's eyes narrowed a fraction. "Thank you."

There was a pause. The king doggedly ate his roast chicken leg.

"Henri certainly outdid himself."

"Indeed. That soufflé ..."

"You tried the soufflé?"

"How could I not, ma'am? You must have got any number of compliments."

"Oh, a few." The queen picked up her teacup, took a dainty sip, and placed it back on its saucer. "Lillian, I thought, was looking particularly–"

"I knew it!" the prince shouted, slamming both hands on the table. "Mother, I am _not_ marrying my cousin."

"Second cousin. Once removed!"

"Second, third, eighty-eighth – I don't care. I will not marry Lillian!"

"Well, you're going to have to do something after the spectacle you made of yourself last night."

"What spec–"

"People will be talking about the ball for _years_, but not because of the soufflé!"

"Mother, you are over-reacting."

"Every dance! Twenty-four dances with that girl when propriety dictates two, at most. The whispering I endured! Have you no _pride_?"

"My pride is perfectly intact, thank you. Perhaps you should take more care with yours. That fulminating expression makes you look positively haggard. Why, I was asked if my grandmother was in attendance last night."

The queen ascended from her seat like an avenging fury, outrage reverberating in every vertebrae of her stiffened spine. The prince smiled, rising also.

"Bernard, tell your son he's making a complete cake of himself."

"Father, are you going to let a mere woman to talk to the heir of the realm this way?"

"A large sponge cake with white icing, and–"

"When father dies, you, ma'am, will not–"

"One of those spun-sugar cupids with the enormous–"

"Be invited to stay in this castle nor even the Dowager Palace–"

"And _nobody_ likes sponge cake!"

"I'm going to marry her!"

The king swallowed his mouthful of raisin scone and said, "Who? Your mother?"

"No, not Mother, the girl. The girl – the princess, the enchantress, the _goddess_ I danced with last night."

"Fair enough." The king nodded good-naturedly. "Where is she then?"

There was another pause. The queen folded her arms and inclined her head politely.

"Home. Seeking her parents approval and blessing. She'll return later in the week."

The prince abruptly left.

--

That evening, the prince was in his dressing room, struggling out of his well-tailored jacket with a ferocity the garment did not deserve. His valet found him red-faced and arms akimbo; one wrenched behind his back, the other sawing futilely at the air above his head.

"Laugh at your peril."

The valet gently disentangled his master and laid the jacket over the back of a chair. "I understand I'm to be giving you my felicitations."

"Yes. Thank you."

"I never saw her but I understand she's a fair-looking girl is Lady ...?"

"You may remove my waistcoat now."

"And so she went home to inform her parents. Good, honest thing to do. Is the weather pleasant this time of year over in ... where was it again?"

"Am I to understand by this subtle prodding that you have something on your mind?"

The valet folded his master's waistcoat into a neat square. "Just seems to me that no one knows nothing about this girl, is all."

The prince fiddled with one of the buttons on his cuff. "Neither do I." He looked up. "But I love her!"

"Course you do, sir; no one's questioning that. The maids are in quite the flutter over the looks you was giving this girl. So how you going to get her back?"

"There's no question of 'getting her back'. I assume she'll return in her own time. I know neither her name, her people, nor her present address, while she is well aware of mine. Let her contact me."

There was a pause.

"You don't think, may be you might ... take it upon yourself ..."

"No."

"But–"

"I have one of her shoes; she will come back for _that_ if nothing else."

"Some might say, having with gotten to the ball, she had made the first move" The valet waited.

"And now it's your turn..." he suggested. "I'm just saying that slipper might maybe be a–"

"She ran out on me!"

"Ah," said the valet quietly. "Pride."

"No. Not pride; _propriety_. The respect and deference due to a crown prince. Which she forgot briefly, but I am willing to forgive the oversight."

The valet concentrated on untying his master's neck-cloth.

"No comment?"

"It is not my place, your highness."

"You don't understand, you can't ... I proposed to her. I laid my heart and my country at her glass-shod feet and she _ran_! Ran like I was some hideous monster..." The prince looked briefly at his reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall, breathed in and raised his chin.

"I am a prince. And there are proprieties I must observe. I followed her out of the ballroom but I will go no further. If she does not wish to return, I certainly am not going to embarrass us both by raising a hue and cry. There are the dignities of my line to consider."

The valet remained silent as he divested the prince of his remaining clothes. He then went to the next room and turned back the cover on the prince's bed. The prince followed tugging a nightshirt over his head.

"She will come back; I just need to be patient."

The valet bowed and left, closing the door behind him.


	4. Frankly, My Dear

**Frankly, My Dear  
**

Franklin was a very practical, thoughtful, studious type of girl. One had to be with a name like Franklin attached to one. It was the spilt milk at her christening – making her grandmother shake her head in bewilderment and her sisters raise their eyebrows at each other because they were pretending to be too polite to laugh – and Franklin had long since learnt not to cry over it.

Franklin was a very practical type of girl and so when her father's business enterprises collapsed and angry creditors came round demanding money in loud voices, it was she who had knotted her brow over tangled accounts, set them all straight and used the remaining money to remove her family to the country. The rose too had seemed practical at the time. Her father, she had supposed, could not possibly botch up finding a florist and purchasing one flower – she hadn't even specified a colour.

Franklin was a very thoughtful type of girl and so when the front door of the country cottage had burst in on a dark and stormy night and her father stood on the threshold with a wild look in his eye and a wilder story on his tongue, she listened and considered and said that he had done very well to suggest her to the beast and would leave as soon as its carriage arrived to take her.

Franklin was a very studious type of girl and so knew her fairy tales, and it was these that she was considering as the carriage, drawn by unseen, unknown, uncanny means and doubtlessly meant to disconcert and subdue weak wills, pulled up before a large and daunting edifice.

If Franklin were one to be easily daunted.

Which she was not.

A cloud attempted to pass across the sun to throw the prospect into sudden dimness but with a pointed look it was sent scurrying back to the horizon. Likewise a chilly breeze that dared to whip round a corner and try to raise the hairs on the back of her neck was sent on its way.

Suddenly there was a loud roar which echoed about the landscape, setting the ground trembling beneath her feet and effectively disguising which direction the noise was coming from. Nevertheless, Franklin looked about herself curiously, trying to guess. The animal who made it would be some type of cross between a boar, a lion, and a ... wildebeest? and perhaps a smattering of bat perhaps, she mused.

The beast appeared through the not-entirely-unexpected portal of the front door. It loomed over her, partly because of a naturally tall physique and partly due to its standing on the top step of the flight that lead to the front door while she remained on the gravel driveway. To Franklin satisfaction, the beast did appear to be something of a cross between a boar and a lion while its silky brown-black fur was not unlike a bat's.

"Do you like ducklings?" she asked.

It blinked. "Excuse me?"

"I asked if you liked ducklings."

"I ... yes?"

"And what is the best form of human government?"

The beast roared again its terrible earth-quaking roar, perhaps hoping it might gain some degree control over the conversation. But Franklin put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow to a degree that very clearly stated: _answer the question, if you please_._ Or even if you don't._

"I suppose ... meritocracy as set out by Plato in his seminal work _The Republic_?"

_And? _prompted the eyebrow.

"Sorry for roaring," the beast mumbled.

"I can see very clearly," Franklin stated in a loud, clear voice, "that underneath your beastly exterior you are really a polite, good-natured, intelligent individual. If I had to I would gladly marry you." And for good measure she stood on tiptoe, pulled the beast's head down by its tusks and bestowed a kiss upon it – mostly on its mouth but partly on its teeth as the general lack of lips made the manoeuvre rather awkward.

As she had her eyes closed at the time, Franklin's perception of the transformation was only a small unenthusiastic popping noise and then the sudden loss of her balance as her hands grasped at thin air where once there had been bone.

Fortunately, the handsome young man wearing clothes six sizes too big for him managed to catch her before she fell ignominiously to the hard gneiss steps.

"Th-thank you," he stuttered. "There is nothing I could ever do to repay you."

"You might give me use of your coach, so I can get home again," she suggested.

There was a small awkward pause.

"Go home? You don't ..."

"Want to marry you, actually? Well, no; not particularly. I only said 'if I had to', and there doesn't seem to be much need for it anymore, so ... Besides, my father and sisters can barely feed and clothe themselves – who knows what mischief they've gotten up to with me gone almost a day."

The handsome young man looked at his hands with a rather gloomy expression on his face despite the fact that they had not turned back into paws since her reneging.

"Sorry," Franklin added, up-cheeringly.

* * *

_You can't tell me you've never wished someone wouldn't just _do_ that and it would all be so much simpler. And less satisfying. I know, it's still not the father but Franklin popped into my head and wouldn't go away. _


	5. Daddy Dearest

_Disclaimer: Please don't confuse Michael Marcus Lucius, Esquire, with myself, nor what he implies with what I believe. And the first three things the beast says are taken from Andrew Lang's version of 'Beauty and the Beast' in _The Blue Fairy Book_._

_floribet: Neat. Ta-da!_

_For_ slipshod.

* * *

**Daddy Dearest**

My name is Michael Marcus Lucius, Esquire. Those who move in the right circles will recognise the name. So the only question is, do you?

My wife died at childbirth and I single-handedly raised three daughters; Aorgen, Diamanda, and Abelinda. I have in my lifetime owned three galleons, two frigates, four junks and eight caravans. Again, if this means nothing to you that is a discrepancy on your part not mine. Money has passed through my hands as freely as water, so much that I have not taken the care to count it.

And by that you may deduce that you are in the presence of a superior intellect, an impeccable understanding of business, and the grit and determination of a pit-bull terrier. I have manners as well, to be turned on and off like a switch when I will it. Have you noticed I don't waste them on you?

Come, man! Don't look like that. Don't get up to leave. Don't take it that way, I'm only pulling your leg. Only look at this sleeve – is this the sleeve of a wealthy man? No, indeed it's not. Do a man a favour, put away your frown and scowl. Today I am victorious, and _that_, man, is a story you most dearly want to hear.

I'll buy you a round.

Another round for the victorious victor! I'm also _very_ drunk today, but so are you so let's be friends.

No, you _do_ want to be my friend, and I'll tell you why. _I_ am a lucky man, a very lucky man and if you're lucky the luck might rub off and you look like you could use some luck, don't you?

I am not guessing! It's plain as daylight on the nose of my face – because what man but a down-on-his-luck man would be seen in a rat-hole like this? Which begs the question what I, lucky man that I am, am doing in a rat-hole like this – don't naysay me, I can see it in your eye!

It happened on that day – d'you remember the snowstorm? Yes, that day, the one with the snowstorm. I'm thick as brick stupid and go a wandering in the snowstorm.

No, drunk as drunk as a ... drunk, I don't remember what I was doing. Yes, I do! Because my daughter wanted a rose, it's what got me into trouble, that rose. What's she want a rose for, I ask, but she just wants a rose. So I like a loving father go find her a rose. In a snowstorm, I don't remember why in a snowstorm – could have picked a better time.

But _then_! There was no snowstorm!

No, there _was_ a snowstorm – it was the _day_ with the snowstorm and I was _in_ the snowstorm and _then_ it wasn't there anymore.

Listen, you either shut up and let me tell the story or I don't tell the story, alright? Good.

Now, I was there where there was no snowstorm and what was there instead was a castle, and night was falling and I am Michael Marcus Lucius, _Esquire_, so I saunter in bold as you please. And then I find a dinner, I follow the smell and I find it. And then I say, I _shout_ – Hey! This anyone's food – No, I don't, I say it nicer. _Excuse me, denizens of the household_ I told you I had manners, right? _Is this meal for the master of the house?_

And I waited. _I wish to speak to the owner of this establishment, and ask that I might partake in this meal. _And there's still no answer and I'm so hungry from the snowstorm I go and eat it, because I figure someone would have stopped me if they didn't like it.

And I also had something to drink, very fine vintages they were, and so when I turned around there was this bed behind me. Not like a bed, like a truckle-bed, and I hadn't seen it before 'cause I was a trifle disguised. So it was like it appeared by magic but it hadn't. Yeah ... and there was no one about still so I say again in a big voice _Forgive me for the incessant questioning but I dearly wish to do neither yourselves nor myself a disservice. May I enquire as to whether this bed is for my use?_

What did I say about talking, stop talking. You got to know all this – it makes the rest of it make sense. So I go to sleep, and then I wake up, and there's a washbasin and towels and breakfast, and all the time I keep asking if I can use it and no one keeps answering so I figure it's fine.

Then I go to leave and I see out the window roses – roses like Abelinda wanted, though what she wants them for I don't know, she's a strange girl. I go to the roses, after I'm out of the castle I walk round to where they are. And I'm getting pretty tired of the whole thing now but I still say _Can I take one of these, right?_ And pluck one.

Then! _Then!_

What am I doing, I'm standing there and this huge dirty huge big monster comes _roaring_ at me. And he's going, in a voice of thunder _Who told you that you might gather my roses? Was it not enough that I allowed you to be in my palace and was kind to you? _

It wanted to eat me, but this isn't my first time about the shipyard – I know things, I know _legal_ things. I've had three galleons, two frigates, four junks and eight caravans in my time, and that means you _have_ to know. So I said _Hold on. There's no sign, there's nothing to say they're _not_ for taking. _

_This is the way you show your gratitude, by stealing my flowers! But your insolence shall not go unpunished. _He keeps going on, but he keeps not making sense.

_No_ say I_ that's just stupid. Here you go giving me free meals and a bed and there's nothing to say I shouldn't have the rose too. If you don't want people taking them, you don't first let them into your house and give them stuff. That's changing the rules in the middle, that is. And not telling me is cheating. Cheating! What kind of man are you? _And I pretend I made a mistake, _Hmm, rather an impolitic question, wasn't it? _but I hadn't.

_Nothing will save you from the death you deserve!_ he roars in my face.

Now, maybe that would have made some people tremble, but me, no, I'm more man than that. _Pfff – _Death_! Where's the sense in that? Listen, mate, you may be six times bigger than me but that doesn't matter a copper penny if you don't start making sense. Why would you kill me now? The rose is already off the bush, the damage is done, mate. It's going to die and nothing's going to change that. And when did men start killing each other over girly little flowers?_

And I go to pretend I made a mistake again but then he says really quick _Why did you _steal_ a 'girly little flower' then? _And I think hard and fast and I say with a shrug _There are people back home who might be interested in a cutting. Roses aren't so common where I'm from._

_You don't want it for a daughter? _he asked. And that's when I got suspicious. I mean, I should have been suspicious before, with a dirty great monster trying to eat me but maybe I was still drunk or something.

And I said _No, I've got six sons, we run a gardening business together. Would you like one of them? I can see you're a big male beastie and I didn't reckon you'd be playing for the other side, but I'm not going to judge. I'm a man of business and far be it from me to be judging a client – to each to his own, you live and you learn, right?_

The monster goes quiet, silent, starts to back down so I close the deal _Would you like one? I'm not sure which way they swing but the youngest one's a little, you would know of course, not like the others. 'Effeminate' – is that what you lads call it? Seriously, my life for the boy, I'll make you the trade; give me a cart and I'll send him right over._

That's when the beastie let me go, and that's when I walked away victorious. From almost eaten to leaving behind a sad animal with its tail between its legs. So let that be a life lesson to you, to all of you, are you listening? If life comes at you with big teeth and you think you're about to be eaten, cut off its balls and you'll come up smelling like roses_._

Ha! Words of wisdom from the very mouth, the _very _mouth of Michael Marcus Lucius, Esquire. And it's lucky you are that I condescended to tell you so why aren't you writing them down?

--


	6. Despite Appearances

_I know this fairy tale in two forms, _The Dazzling Falcon Finister _(from Russia) and _The Calf's Skin_ (from Slovakia); you may know it as almost but not quite _East of the Sun and West of the Moon _(thanks, watsonkat)._

* * *

**Despite Appearances**

"Master."

It was a hiss from between the servant's clenched teeth, nearly lost in the stifling swathes of brocade that covered the bed and hung from its four posts, carpeted the floor and decorated the walls. A faint scent of potpourri drifted on the air; even the prince's chamber, that bastion of the gentlemanly masculine, had not eluded the queen's condescension. The prince paused, cup poised on his lip, ready to be tilted and sipped.

"Master. She will kill me if she knows I have spoken, but I must tell you the cup you drink is laced with a sleeping draught."

The prince lowered the cup, and regarded the young man for a few moments. "Who is 'she'?"

"The queen, your wife."

"Indeed."

"She's drugging you. There's this woman who works down in the pig sty but she's lain in your bed the past two nights, I hear her through the door. She weeps for you to wake up, cries tears like dew beading on pale rose petals, only wishing you might open your eyes. She was your love, but the queen doesn't want you to remember! She's done something to you, and now she's drugging you so you don't even know the woman's there. Please, master, don't drink."

"I thank you for your concern–"

"You don't understand! She has walked thousands of miles and crossed the endless ocean; she has met the sun and the moon and the stars in their homes and supped with them; she has worn to pieces three pairs of iron shoes, snapped three iron rods, filled three iron bowls with her tears; all for love of _you_. She loves you, sir, as we poor mortals can only hope to be loved. She has given up treasures beyond cost to spend three nights with you, so that you will remember who she is, remember your love for her. Sir, if you could _see _her; she is the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most perfect woman to ever walk the earth. I _beg_ you, master, don't drink."

"How long has this girl been here?" the prince asked.

"A few weeks at most, sir."

"And she has done all these things ... it was she who told you she had?"

"Yes, sir."

"Does her tale not sound a little fantastical to you? East of the moon and west of the sun – like a children's story?"

"Sir, if you could just see her, you would never doubt she spoke the truth."

"'If you could just see her...'" the prince mused at the boy's feverish eyes and fervent lips. "And my wife is not very beautiful, is she? If I may ask one more question. What need have I for the most beautiful, most wonderful, most perfect woman when my wife loves me, and I her?"

"You don't! It's a trick–"

"_You forget your place_."

The words hung in the air, delicate and tenuous as swords suspended on cobwebs, until the prince smiled gently. "It may seem incredible to one of your age, but I do love my wife, plain as she is. And because I love her, I trust her."

He raised the cup again.

"Master!" the servant cried.

"I trust my wife," the prince said quite simply, and drank.


	7. I Don't Give a Damn

_Another obscure Eastern-European tale, sorry. Bluebeard might have been a more obvious choice but dead girls can't talk back. My thanks to taniaSLC for reminding me of the other thing I hate about fairy tale heroines – why can't they just follow instructions?

* * *

_

**I Don't Give a Damn**

Franklin was bored. Franklin was bored and fuming slightly.

Fuming muchly.

She was downright furious and the intoxicatingly jolly music coming from the forbidden hundredth room was not helping matters.

It was more trouble than it was worth really, being a youngest daughter. Last time had been alright; she was gone for only the better part of a day and when she had got back the extent of the calamity her family had wrought was only three bowls of burnt porridge, a broken chair, and a dear little lamb that refused to be displaced from her bed. This time she had been gone for a year, and she shuddered to think what she would find when she got home.

A year. Trapped for three hundred and sixty-six days, because if her father was going to get his youngest daughter incarcerated in an enchanted castle _of course_ it would be a leap year. Franklin was a person of action – of swift clear thought and even quicker decisive consequences. Three hundred and sixty-six days with nothing to do but sit and be petted and prodded and patronised by magical forces she could not see or hear or smell or taste, only feel as they combed her hair and dressed her and fed her with wanton adoration, had brought Franklin's blood to a slow, steady boil.

Franklin kicked at a small, delicate, carved, gilded, enamelled, fanciful little side table whose only transgression was being uselessly pretty. She kicked it again for good measure. And once more, in case it hadn't gotten the idea. When she realised her kicks were actually in time with the stupid music from the forbidden room she finally snapped.

She stormed up the stairs, marched down the corridor, slammed the second door on the left open, thundered up the east staircase, toppled three statues as she stalked down the gallery on the eighth floor, tackled the barred portico at the end of it open, stomped up the rickety spiral steps beyond, came at last to a small landing thick with undisturbed dust, hammered on the only door present, and yelled, "WOULD YOU KEEP IT DOWN IN THERE!"

There was a sudden embarrassed silence.

"That's better," she snarled. "And so help you if I have to come up here again!"

A very small voice spoke from behind the closed door, "Are you sure you're not ... I mean, aren't you going to open ... just one little peek?"

Franklin glared at the solid wooden door until she heard the gratifying sound of the forbidden room's occupants shuffling in an attempt to avoid her scathing disdain.

"No," she said. "I am not."

She then turned and returned the way she had come at a more sedate, but no less incensed, pace. As she passed a window overlooking the front door, she saw the lady in black rattle into the courtyard.

"Golden-curls, Golden-curls, what have you done?" cried the lady in black when she met Franklin in the entrance hall. "Tell me what was in that room!"

"I have not the slightest idea; why don't you find out for yourself?" Franklin said almost politely.

"Oh! Golden-curls, Golden-curls – see the outcome of idle curiosity. You have broken our trust!"

The lady's words were met with icy silence.

"I _beg_ your pardon?" Franklin asked finally in a tone clearly stating that, to the utter contrary, it was her pardon that ought to be being begged; on bended knee or don't bother going to the trouble.

"You – you ... well, naturally you looked," stuttered the lady in black. "It- they- everyone always- you _did _look, you must have opened the door, everyone opens – _always_ ... the story ... You must have looked!"

"No."

The lady sat down with a light thump upon the gold-flecked flagstones.

"Then I suppose I am ... free?" she said slowly, delicately placing each word as though at a sudden movement they might dissolve in terror.

"Free," she repeated. And with a sudden gasp, "Oh Golden-curls, Golden-curls! What wonder is this? Oh darling, sweet girl, long have I been enchanted but you have broken the spell with your goodness and obedience. Come, you shall be the daughter I never had but was the dearest wish of my heart!"

"Thank you," Franklin said almost civilly. "But I would ask instead for the use of your carriage; I must return home now."

"Home!" cried the lady in black. "No, no! Oh Golden-curls, oh sweet darling girl, here shall be your home. Here your family will be installed with the wealth and privilege of kings. Here you shall stay with me. My magic shall attend us; all you should ever want is between these precious walls. Safe, secure, satisfied – oh Golden-curls, you shall want for _nothing_! I will heap treasures upon you, bury you in fine clothes, surround you with every solicitous care. You have given me my freedom and in turn I shall bestow every freedom in my power upon your sweet self!"

Enough was decidedly more than enough.

There was a loud tearing noise as Franklin rent the thin silk dress she had been encased in that morning from her body. "You can take your dresses, and" (dragging her hair free of its confines) "your hair-ribbons, and" (tossing flimsy-soled slippers to the floor) "your shoes. And your silk stockings, and your eyelash-curlers, and your nail lacquer, and your necklaces, and your bracelets; your porcelain vases and your delicate watercolours; your filigreed candlesticks and your garnished butter; your flounced silk sheets and your _useless, pretty_,_ side tables!_ Good day to you, madam."

Franklin, in only her plain white chemise and her bare feet, flung the front door open with a resounding crash and stalked out into the courtyard.

"Golden-curls?" the lady in black whimpered behind her.

She turned.

Spat, "My name is Franklin. I said _good day_."

And left.


	8. Perfect

_For Elle, by way of Murtle Yuts, who hates chores with a passion. And just to mix things up a bit, this time Cinderella ends exactly as it usually does.

* * *

_

**Perfect**

I like peeling potatoes.

I suppose its difficult for some people to understand, but no, I really, really do.

You see, I think people's problem – not that it _is_ a problem, just a sort of block that may cause a certain amount of uh, problematisation. So the problem, which is not a problem per se, of the people would be that they can't appreciate a fine peel.

I remember the first time I managed to skin a potato in one long curling stroke; it had taken me months to become so proficient. Perhaps people also lack the patience to do things right.

I like doing things right. If you could see my kitchen, you would notice every pot is shining and lined up in order of size. Every plate, dish, and bowl is in its correct place. The countertops are scrubbed and the floors swept so clean you could eat off them – not, of course, that you would want to; it would be terribly unhygienic, but the option is available to any strange people.

There I go with my 'people' again. I've never actually met 'people', and I'm sure I wouldn't like them if I did! Well, no, I usually get along with everyone I meet but the point is I haven't met many everyones.

My stepmother, my two stepsisters, Patricia the dresser, Brunhilda the upstairs maid, Carrie the downstairs maid, Mr Buttons the groom, Ward the butler, Mr Eldrich the shoemaker, Mrs Flaherty the dressmaker, Jerry Goshawk the butcher, Mr White the baker, Mr Black the blacksmith, and the Savages – Mr, Mrs, Jack, and Jill – who bring me milk and eggs and vegetables and other things from their farm. That is a list of everyone I've ever known.

And my father, who's dead.

There is a ball tonight, where there will be lots of people. My stepmother and my two stepsisters have gone to it. I was told to stay at home – not that I would have wanted to go any way, but all possibilities must be accounted for. I was also told to sort a barrel of rice and barley into two half-barrels of each grain but I have already done it.

It's not like it's a very mentally strenuous task; it's very easy only I suspect people would not find it so because they do not have the patience to do it right. Like peeling potatoes perfectly, or counting the exact number of rosemary tines needed to season a pie properly. Some birds came in the window trying to get at the grain but I shooed them away. You would not believe how many germs live on birds, they're quite disgusting really.

I told a slight untruth. I do want to go to the ball, actually. And I am very sorry for it, because I am not usually so disobedient, but I shall ignore my stepmother's express wishes. I am very lucky she gave me a home after my father died; she has told me of many cases where people – those 'people' again, but these are my stepmother's people and she has seen a great deal more of the world than I have so her people are true persons – have not been so kind to family not of their own blood. I am a sore trial to my stepmother, and I know for she has told me many times of how I could better myself.

But I have taken my step-mother's strictures to heart and have bettered myself. Which is why I now want to go to the ball; quite the contradiction, to raise myself to my step-mother's standards only to then depart the bounds of her influence. Though I'm sure she is universally applicable, if you understand what I mean. I hope _I_ know what I mean, there's still so much I need to find out about the world in general and people in particular. Palace people in specific particular.

Oh yes, my plan. I have put on my best dress, and washed my face and hands, and brushed my hair. I look proficient, presentable, I think. Perhaps I should have left some flour beneath my finger nails, so people will know I mean business. It is so _very_ hard to know how to go on when one knows so very little.

Should I go by the front door or the service entrance? I wouldn't want to seem presumptuous, but how seriously would my request be taken if it came from the servants' quarters? The front door, yes. I will walk straight in, and then straight up to the prince – unless he's dancing with someone, or having an important conversation. Perhaps I had better approach the queen; it is the prince's night after all, he will be the one most occupied.

Yes, I shall approach the queen. I shall say, Your majesty – ma'am? majesty? Best to go with majesty; one can't be too respectful of one's betters. Oh, I hope my stepmother will not completely cast me off. I shall ask for a job in the kitchens, as a cook for I wouldn't want to spend my days scrubbing pots – not that there isn't a good deal of satisfaction in degriming a well-caked dish. Perhaps I should take a plate of something along, in case my credentials need to be confirmed. No, there's no time to make anything properly now.

This is how my happy ending goes: _And she cooked happily ever after_. Haha!

Well, there's no sense in standing about prevaricating any longer; I'll only work myself into knots. And really the palace is too far away to be carrying anything there on foot anyway.

I'm leaving. Right now. Wish me luck.


	9. Digressions

**Digressions**

_Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, they are the life, the soul of reading; take them out of this book, you might as well take the book along with them; one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer, he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids all hail, brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail._ – Tristram Shandy, Volume I; Laurence Sterne

* * *

She bit the apple.

--

"She"

Well, there's a question for you. Don't start with the easy one, by all means. 'She' – who was 'she'? Snow White – there, that's her name, the name her mother gave her; the game her mother, the knave, played on her (see what she did there?). But her name was not her – 'Snow White' is not the full scope and essential particulars of the entity she refers to as 'She' – the signifier bears only an arbitrary relationship to the signified. But that world 'essential' – ay, there's the rub, is it not? 'She' is a princess, that is who she is, and despite her leanings towards the writings of Derrida and Foucault, her very self, _she,_ stands in the way of a nonessential world view. She was made to work, to scrub the palace steps, to draw water from wells, to pluck chickens and polish silver, she was, for all intents and purposes, a maid – her stylised repetition of acts, the smudged face, the tiny room, the lye-roughened hands, was a perfect impregnable performance of the working-class girl. And yet, an unhappy performative. Her stepmother still knew she was a princess, the heir to the throne, the young and the beautiful usurper. Her stepmother _knew_ the exterior was not the essence, the acts done did not a maid make: she was, for all truth and infinity, a _princess_. In this world there are absolutes; sorry, Jacques.

"bit"

In other verbs, nibbled, gnawed, crunched, chewed, masticated, ate (nonono, those are all ongoing actions, she bit once - she only had to bite once). In other words, tad, morsel, crumb, fragment, speck, moiety, trace, piece. To whit, she bit a piece; for peace, a bit of. Which reminds her.

"the"

There was this game once – she had learnt a speech ("I met a fool, a _fool_ in the _forest_") and for fun and educational purposes she acted out each word. Nouns were easy, verb even more so, with the adjectives she started to run into trouble, but what really fascinated her was the little words: a, of, but, _the_. The difference between 'a' and 'the' was really quite extraordinary when she started to think about it – not a Snow White but _the _Snow White, get it? Not any old so-and-so but the clear precise one and only (Angus. Angus should have been her name, for that's what it meant: the one and the only). And that's the other thing – do you say it _thuh_ or _thee_? It reminds her of two things, thoughts that spring and grow in two opposite directions simultaneously (isn't the human mind a wonderful thing?), one is a memory as a child of learning when to say 'a' and 'an' – an elephant big and blue, a chair, an hour, a hippopotamus (or 'h's all be 'an's?) – and the second, she once sang in a choir, a little amateur thing (oh, but their hearts were in it), and in one song there was a 'the' right before a page turn and everyone would start singing _thuuuh _only to turn the page and discover it should have been a _theee_ and then they'd try to change the vowel in the middle. It made her snigger every time. Sniggering – one of the glorious freedoms of being a (indefinite article) nobody maid.

"apple"

It began with Eve – it might not have, there was probably a story before that Eve was based on, but for her, with her limited knowledge of world mythology, it begins with Eve. The foolish woman, unable to curb her curiosity falls and fails and falls (curiosity killed the cat. And satisfaction brought it back – why do people always forget the second bit?). Pandora, there's another, couldn't keep her hands to herself. What about the three goddesses with their golden apple, starting wars over something so terribly trivial as female vanity. She's one in a long line, her story joins theirs, beware vanity beware curiosity beware beware (I rise from the ashes with my red hair – red, the way a burnt field is black). Eat 5-plus a day, girls, but avoid the apples. (It's all true.) What is it about apples? She tries to imagine but it just wouldn't be the same with a cumquat, the banana of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil just doesn't have the same appeal (a peel – geddit?). Though the pomegranate, now there's a piece of fruit with some scope for imagination. But to do the thing properly, to become an instant classic and be played with all the greatest hits, to enter the slipstream of the collective unconscious, it's got to be an apple.

--

He kisses her. (A thousand millions thoughts, billions, each crystal bright and piercing with new love, old, love, forsaken love, betrayed love, a Judas kiss and a kiss of life.) She doesn't notice; she is too lost in her thoughts to wake up.

* * *

_There's quite a few different poets I've gone and intertextualised, 'cause I actually can't stop myself from doing so; Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Yehuda Amichai, Stephen Berkoff. The works of Foucault and Derrida (and Butler, though her reference got taken out) are very interesting, I recommend them for a couple of weeks' heavy reading. And I've got a couple of FAILs stock-piled now, so if this one made your head hurt, never fear - the next one's much easier.  
_


	10. The Fairy Tale of the Third Assistant of

_To be frank, the following is quite pedestrian, but then that's actually the point really. Go read _The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_, it's much better._

* * *

**The Fairy Tale of the Third Assistant of J. Alfred Prufrock**

My job, really? No one's ever asked me about my job before. Well, except for my fiancé when he was still trying to get me to walk out with him. Not even my parents over the dinner table – they're always worried about the shop.

Uh, my name is Donatella Moss; and I'm the third assistant to the undersecretary of the Honourable Justice Leagueman, member of the King's Privy Council and head of the Royal Hospitality Committee.

My job is ... indefinite, really. It depends on the situation. I suppose, despite the fancy title, I'm a general dogsbody. So I get all the little jobs and see to it that no one more important needs to worry about them, or even realise there is something to be done. Invisibility, really, is my main aim.

Uh, there was this princess. She had – I forget exactly how, and you can't believe a half of what the stories say anyway – this thing where every time she spoke precious stones would fall from her lips. And basically, it was my job to sit near the top table during meals and whatnot to record each topic of conversation the noblemen brought up, so that they would get their fair share of the gems produced. Oh, the stones that fell out of her mouth changed depending on the subject - diamonds were statecraft, jasper for literature, you know the little blue ones that aren't sapphires? they were freshwater fishing but there was only one night when the princess got stuck next to Lord Simon. And garnets were bird-watching, Sir Leagueman made himself a few of those. He set a couple of the smaller ones as necklaces for his staff, which I think was really decent of him because there's not so many noblemen that considerate of those beneath him.

Another time, it was another princess and she had a frog that would follow her around everywhere – Guglielmo, was its name. I spent three weeks researching what frogs ate and corralling footmen to catch the things, and then I find out its a toad and eats human food anyway. It's a thankless job sometimes, and I mean that both figuratively and literally, but someone's got to do it, right? We can't all of us be important. For every protagonist centre stage declaiming to the footlights, there's another half a dozen needed to fill in the scene, to support the main players; Mr Prufrock – my immediate superior, the undersecretary – told me that once, when he overheard me complaining about the frog, toad. And how should I presume to be any better, you know?

Come on, you can't be interested in this. I'm really so ordinary. I don't go on adventures, or get introduced to royalty, or attend grand parties – I don't even plan them, I write the invitations, that's how far down the chain I am. I'm not saying I'm not good at my job: that's not what I meant at all. Just the other day I was going through the guest list for the baby princess's christening and found a fairy had been missed off the godmother list, and you can just imagine the kerfuffle that would have happened if I hadn't fixed it then and there. But, you know, it's just little things, things anyone could do. I'm a normal person going about their job, and maybe I won't change the world, but you know what? I wouldn't want to. I want to get married, have some kids – and, well, maybe I would like to become first assistant to Mr Prufrock – but that's fairy tale enough for me, really.


	11. Iron Shoes

_I know iron. I know its weight. Its taste._

– The Iron Shoes; Johnny Clewell

----

**The girl, the one without a name. **Hello

love. (?)

I've never seen you asleep. You came in the night, watched me fall and left before I woke up in the morning. You do not sleep easily, lines upon your forehead, deep shadows under your eyes. I'm sorry – it's not my fault.

Egyptian cotton sheets – am I right? They're nice, but I've been sleeping in a pigsty for two weeks, so I would say that, wouldn't I? I'd forgotten what straw felt like – it was straw pallets we had back home, back when we met. I used to lie awake feeling each individual stem poke holes in my back, rustling with life when I lay perfectly still. I got good at lying perfectly still, very invisible, simply missable. That's just the way it was.

Must be a two hundred thread-count: percale. That's money for you. But you know what

I prefer satin.

Satin that slips and twines between my legs. Steals my body's heat 'til I wake up in the night burning. Satin's the only lover that doesn't leave before dawn.

It's not entreaty or regret you hear; it's anger. At first I had a sorrow that bent my back in two – it made the bowls easy, they were the first to go, I filled them in a week. But no one had mentioned what to do then.

I left them with a smithy after sitting in the sun for three days watching the tears slowly evaporate to a thin salty crust. She – the smithy – I think she uses them as moulds now. Or to hold nails, I don't know. You didn't want them back, did you? You didn't want a trophy of what you can make a poor girl do. Did you?

The iron sticks; they were harder. Harder but not impossible – obviously or I wouldn't be here (I – _I –_ don't break a promise. You whispered so many promises in the night – they rustled the straw more than any mouse).

I don't break promises, but I do think. That's not against the rules, is it? And I thought, what need have I for iron sticks? wood would do just as well for walking, and fibreglass better still. What need have I for three weapons, strong enough to break heads and kneecaps and letterboxes? I don't fight – I never put up a fight, I never ever put up a fight, I just don't.

I just don't so I turned around and walked three weeks and three years and three days back to the smithy, and she –the smithy – asked why they couldn't just be melted down, and I said _no, _I _don't break promises, I never ever ever break promises_. So she helped me snap those pretty iron sticks in two _then_ melted them down, and that was that.

That, my dazzling sir, Herr Falcon, was that.

Except the shoes

The shoes that – which

They were useful. They were nigh-well indestructible. They were better than glass or fur or demon-dancing-red slippers. They burnt my feet like hot coals. Let's leave it at that.

Those shoes took me anywhere. That's what I wanted to say. Those shoes took me anywhere I wanted to go. I walked the world and back – they were better than Cinderella's slip-ons sure, but you know what? They were better than the seven-league boots of your man Jack.

Your man Jack – jack-of-all-trades, jack-the-giant-killer, jack-of-hearts, _Jack_ – strides across the world solving every problem and making a million more – but what does he _see_? What can he _feel_? How can you get a measure of the world rushing seven leagues over it with every step, lording seven leagues above it?

I walked the world. I _walked_ it. Searching for you – perhaps – at first. And as luck would have it (my luck that's been a stranger all my life and now shows its face, as it would have it), just when I had stopped looking, I stumble across you. But here's the thing

you're not in the last place I'll look – oh _no_.

I may have been at this at least a lifetime, and I may have cornered you at last between your white cotton sheets, but this is only the beginning – only the very first place where I'm going to look. Because as I was searching for you, I found –

Have you ever floated in a night-black sea, buoyed up by nothing but so ordinary salt, with your hair trailing out behind you like seaweed, and the moonshine dribbling light on the water painting your toenails silver? Battened your lashes down against the glare of a sun making pink stained-glass windows out of you eyelids as you walk the sea of sand the Son of Man once tread?

Have you ever sat on the hood of a rust-bucket car while all around is the brilliant blue ocean and the great green earth, licked at your ice cream melting sweet happiness over your hand as you laugh into the dazzling (truly dazzling) sky? Found your way through darkness to the crown of a hill, stood in the lap of the statue of Time and shouted Shakespeare to the city of lights below?

Have you ever been pounded by drum and bass 'til your head throbbed and your tailbone palpitated and the blood in your veins pushed ice-cold lightening into the world? Ever lain on your back in a soft stolen dimness and let the opening chords of a symphony swallow you whole? Have you ever heard the music of the spheres on Earth?

I have wept three iron bowls of tears, climbed three iron mountains, eaten three loaves of iron bread, mown down three walls of iron thorns, swum the breadth of three iron seas, snapped three iron canes, cut the throats of three iron pigs, ground down three iron mirrors to dust: all in those iron shoes. I've done everything the stories ever asked and more, always more – because I am the girl. I have no name, never have and never will. I am every girl to ever be forsaken, to ever be good and kind and true (except for that one single instance but what can a poor girl do, it's only my nature, isn't it?). I've come to rescue you, I always do.

I always did.

Do you understand? _Can_ you understand? Why I'm not going to sit here and cry tears on your face so you'll wake up, that will not be me again – I don't want it to be. Don't think I'm afraid. I'm not explaining, justifying myself to you, I don't do that anymore. And I'm not asking permission, don't want it, don't need it.

Just _don't_.

Listen, I've got to get going. Girl over Pennsylvania way's relying on me to buck the archetype of female passivity.

I loved you – that's the best I can give. I did love you, but now.

I've fallen in love with the world, and there's still so much more of it to see.

----

_She sighs, _

"_O, you should see the things that I can do_

_With these iron shoes_

_I've tap-danced my way through a Broadway Revue _

_Stamped out fires in Palestine, too_

_Kicked the shit out of anyone not good and true._

_But could you – yes, you_

_Could you?_

_(In these shoes_

_Honey, I doubt you'd survive.)_

– Slipshod Shoes; Chloe Darling


	12. The Nature of the Beast

_Warning: Implications of child abuse and rape._

* * *

**The Nature of the Beast**

Beauty was beautiful. Her sisters were nothing special but Beauty had been beautiful since she was five years old. It hardly surprised her that a request so simple as a rose ended in her being sold to another male - beast or man, she barely acknowledged a difference.

-.-.-

Beauty descended from the carriage and was met by the Beast at the front door. Her body was stiff with a wariness set deep in the bones.

He held out a paw. Beast, he said.

She wasn't trusting enough to take a claw-fringed metacarpus, but nodded.

– Beauty, she replied. My father sends his greetings and hopes I find you in good health.

–Why? I am no friend of your father.

A breath whispered from her mouth in a sigh.

–He didn't actually send greetings. I was being polite.

His lip curled in a snarl.

–There's no need to be polite, so there's no need to lie.

Her breathing stopped.

–Come, he said, turning. I'll show you your room.

-.-.-

–Will you marry me?

Her lungs locked tight. _Yes _and _no _fought a bloody battle that left her throat raw. Her teeth chattered in the chill despair of his gaze.

Beauty ran. She didn't know where she ran to but she ran all the same. The corridors twisted her about, sideways and backwards. Returning to the room he had shown her was as impossible as it was stupid – she hoped if she lost herself she would be lost to him too. The room she finally collapsed in could have been any room; its main features were that it was on the ground floor and had a window big enough for her, but not him, to use as an escape route.

-.-.-

–Will you marry me?

She ran.

-.-.-

–Will you marry me?

She ran.

-.-.-

–Will you

She ran.

-.-.-

Slowly, sporadically, she returned to the room he had shown her, that he had said was _hers_. He never entered it. Never even tried the door handle, she knew, because there were nights she stayed awake to be certain.

-.-.-

Before he could say anything, she asked, What would you do if I said no?

–Running away wasn't saying no? he wondered.

–Nothing, he said

–Ask you again tomorrow, he added.

-.-.-

She never called him Beast. To begin with she said _Sir_ because being polite more rarely hurt anyone. After that night she said it because she wanted to.

-.-.-

–Will you marry me?

No.

-.-.-

–Will you marry

No.

-.-.-

–Will

–I'm sorry.

-.-.-

When he asked again she let him ask in full and let the words rest in the air, tasting them.

–Why? You know my answer, so ... why?

–I am a beast, but harbour the hope that you might save me.

–Who told you that? She was outraged, appalled, battle-fierce. Who said that? Who said you were a beast?

–Everyone, no one. Look at me!

–I have for two years!

Her eyes filled with tears; she tipped back her chin and swallowed hard. Looked at the ceiling until she could look at him.

–Beasts, she told him, have thin yellow hair and wide smiles and hot eyes. Beasts call you _slut_ and _whore_ when you're too small to stop them, and _bitch_ and _slut_ and _whore_ when you're old enough to try. Beasts are friends of my father.

-.-.-

Beauty had been beautiful since she was five years old.

-.-.-

The next night when the time came for the question, he said instead, Your father picked a yellow rose.

–It's what I asked for.

–Not red.

–No, she shuddered. And I couldn't have white.

He reached out and held her hand in his for a long time. It occurred to her that this was the first time he had touched her.

–You've never called me Beauty.

He nodded.

–Thank you.

* * *

_If you're wondering about any of my other stories _–_ well, _Ad Undas–_ my laptop is refusing to accept power and I hadn't backed up any files since July '09. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks everything will be sorted and things will get back on schedule. Kia ora, Faylinn, for pointing out the obvious._


	13. Sky Blue

_Snowy, thanks. When I write, I always want to make people think. It often times leads me to try and explain things in as few words as possible, perhaps too few words; I'm glad on this occasion it actually worked._

_This began from a note of Captain Fantastic's called _A Day for Rainbows_, and unfortunately for you she did it much better. _

* * *

**Sky Blue**

The air was so blue she could taste it. She could feel the blue sky slippery and cool on her lips and on those days she had to (she _had to_) escape the grey castle walls with its big brown doors.

The grass would be green and the trees would be green and the ivy would be another green, and one of these days she was going to try and name all of those greens. After she had run about and stained her dress so that the maid would cluck like a fat cream hen and throw her hands up in the air and despair of What Was to Be Done With the Child.

She snuck out of her room, locked it so no one could find out she wasn't there too soon, and hung the silver key around her neck. Yellow dandelions like dandy lions, she thought with a snigger. Blue forget-me-nots, the purple flowers with fairy toothbrushes hidden in their hearts, and the ones like a fern of bright orange trumpets that were her favourite. Her stepmother would like a bunch of them and then no one could tell her off because picking flowers was a ladylike activity. She stifled more sniggers as she passed through the quiet echoing of the entrance hall with its great sprawling mosaic.

One step, two step, green step, blue step – nearly there.

"Hey, small person." She was caught up by her rose pink sash and her feet lifted off the ground. "Where do you think you're going?"

She squirmed and squealed and giggled up into her stepmother's whiskey-golden eyes. "I'm allowed."

"You're allowed?"

"I'm allowed. Daddy says so."

"And if I asked your daddy would he say he says so too?"

"But I'm _s'posed_ to!"

"Oh, you're supposed to now?"

"Yes. Because of my mother."

Her stepmother set her carefully back on her feet. "Your mother?" The words shimmered with yellow worry.

"You don't know the story. I will tell it to you," she said, full of self-importance now, and took her stepmother's hand.

"Once upon a time," she sneaked another green step forward and her stepmother followed, "in the beginnings of summer," indigo step, violet step, "a queen sat sewing at her windowsill," towards the door she went, "and while she looked out over the fields of gold and the pink fluttering ends of spring blossom," with her stepmother tagging along all unsuspecting, "she pricked her finger and a drop of blood fell upon the windowsill. And the queen looked at the blood and said to herself, 'Drat and blast! It is too nice a day to be stuck inside. I'm going out!' And her maid said, 'Oh really?' And the queen said, 'Yes, really. And would that I had a child, _she_ would never have to stay in on a lovely day either!'"

She stood on the threshold with her stepmother, and looked up and twinkled.

"Oh really?" said her stepmother.

"Yes, really. I was going to get you flowers."

"Were you, sweetpea?"

"Yeah ..." she scuffed one foot and peeped through her lashes. "You could help me pick them, so I get the right ones?"

"Love to."

Hand in hand, she stepped with her stepmother out under the blue, blue sky.

---


	14. In the Tradition of Lear

_The following was written on a prompt from _slipshod_. If you have any suggestions of ones that could fail, first I'd say write it yourself because they are quite fun, but if you want to give it to me then by all means do – I always appreciate new ideas. Though whether I will actually ever finish it inside of a year is a whole other matter, I'm terrible like that. _

piratesswriter_ (2lazy2findyouraccount :D), thanks, man - you don't even want to know how many times I changed my mind about which tense that story was going to be in. (And why would I mention it if you don't even want to know? Good question, good question.)  
_

* * *

**In the Tradition of Lear**

And then he waited. It was the noises that made the absence of speech so much louder, as someone once said; the fire's snap, crackle and pop in its hearth, the quiet weeping of his two eldest daughters, tears rolling like pearls down their pale cheeks, the wind and rain of the still-raging storm battering at the windows like a besieging army.

His youngest daughter, the beauty of the family, from whom the silence emanated most strongly, sat straight in her chair, hands folded in her lap and eyes downcast.

But he knew how to crack her. So he waited.

After a few moments, she raised her eyes to his.

He waited.

She bit her rose-petal lips.

He waited.

And pulled the words out of her mouth: "The beast will surely kill you if you return to him. Is there nothing we can do?"

"There is – no, no," he reconsidered.

"Nothing," he hesitated.

"Nothing that bears mentioning," he prevaricated.

And waited.

"What, father?" she eventually replied.

"No, no, it is nothing. I could not expect you to – no, it is my fate" _Beat _"for being a loving father."

And still had to wait. He looked at his youngest daughter: beauty of the family, sitting straight in her chair, hands folded in her lap, eyes downcast.

The absence grew louder.

"_What_, father."

He smiled, but regretfully, contritely. "Nothing, beauty. Only that the beast said 'I will forgive you on one condition - that is, that you will give me one of your daughters' – but of course I said I would do no such thing."

"As you should." She spoke without pause.

He said nothing but not because he was waiting. _This was not how it was meant to be._ He looked at his youngest daughter: beauty of the family, sitting straight in her chair, hands folded in her lap, eyes bright and blue, and clear and direct.

It was her sister who picked up the missed cue. "What have you done, Beauty? It is all your fault!"

"My fault?" Again without a breath of hesitation, the words striking willfully from her mouth. "How is this _my_ fault? Our father's decisions are his own; he is a grown man and he was free - yes, _free, _sister, he was - to choose as he would. He might have chosen to stay another night in town, to wait out a storm instead of riding through it. Once caught, he might have chosen to run, to fight, to argue, to ask how a rose could possibly be worth as much as his daughter's life. He could have chosen to sacrifice himself not another. I fail categorically to see how this is my fault."

She looked at her father: the once upon a time provider of the family, sitting off-kilter in his chair, hands clenched over its arm-rests, eyes blind with dumbfoundment. "Sir, you should not have held truck with ideas of female education, nor hired those fancy tutors; for did not Miss Lloyd always tell us: never be malleable, girls."

"This is not how it is meant to be," the unrehearsed truth slipped from between his lips.

She cocked one beautiful eyebrow. "I do not mind your manipulations when the stakes are pennies apiece. But this is the real thing; this is life and death, father. I will take no part in your production. Forgive me but I will not."

* * *

_The youngest daughter's reasoning in the 'My fault?' paragraph is quite indicative of the week I've had slogging through Continental Philosophy of the 'self' and my love-hate relationship with Satre. This may be something you know or something you don't: a 'Beat' in a script is just that – an almost audible click as the character's thought turns over – for this father's purposes the artificiality of a theatrical performance seemed very apt. And of course, 'beat' has other meanings: flexibility is a choice, malleability is a complex, _never_ be malleable, girls._


	15. Best Kept

_Yeah yeah, it's supposed to be the _frog_ prince but toads are so much more interesting looking – and when I started this I'd just been doing scenes from _Richard III_. With all due honour, respect, and kudos to EmBee who suggested the idea to me in the first place._

* * *

**Best Kept**

She found him at last, sitting on a window ledge overlooking his pond. He had watched her approach with his great golden eyes rolled back over the top of his head, and now croaked a welcome. She stroked the damp, mossy green hide of the bunch-backed toad affectionately.

"Remind me never to doubt you when you decide upon a course of action, Guglielmo; it is disheartening to be wrong on so many occasions."

"It's a good match for you, Princess. It stands to profit the country well. Why are you not dancing?"

"Not this song, this one I wish to spend with you. Do you not recognise it?"

He tilted his head so the flap of skin that passed as his ear was angled towards the musicians. "No," he said after listening to a few strains. "Doesn't ring a bell."

"You toad." The old joke made them smile at each other, small white teeth and moist celery-coloured gums. "It was the song that was playing the first night you hopped up to the castle and my father forced me to share my dinner with you."

"Ah, yes, my first demonstration of the famed courteousness of princesses."

"I know you've more of one than a person reasonably needs, but do endeavour to watch your tongue or I _will _throw you against a wall this time."

He rolled his eyes. No person could roll their eyes as effectively as a toad could. She stuck out her tongue.

"If you're quite so hung up on courtesy, Guglielmo, then why haven't you kissed the bride? Everyone else has; my cheeks are near as moist as yours."

"A gracious offer, Kate, but I haven't lips to accomplish the matter."

"Then," she decided with a smile, scooping him up and raising him to eye level, "we shall bend tradition just slightly and the bride shall kiss you."

"_No_." His haste made him awkward as he struggled out of her hands.

For a moment, her vision refocused and she saw not Guglielmo the entity, the trusted confidante and advisor, her truest friend in the world, but the physical reality of the muddy pebble-skinned toad. It reminded her of the disgust she had felt when the slimy, grotesque little creature exacted a promise of hospitality in return for her golden ball.

"I am sorry, my friend," she said to remind herself. "I did not mean to upset you. If you will not take a kiss, I will ask another boon of you."

"Certainly."

"No, Guglielmo; never agree until you have asked the terms. You taught me that."

"Then what are the terms?"

"You've made your promise now, you cannot take it back."

"Kate."

"Tell me how you came to talk."

"You've never asked before," he pointed out.

"It didn't seem polite. And you're avoiding the question."

Guglielmo hurrumphed and thought.

"There once was a witch who was very powerful, and prideful with it. She liked to ride about the world upon an ass to demonstrate to all the greatness of her power, for she could persuade the animal to set forth with no need of help from stick or carrot.

"And then one day, the ass stopped by a pond to drink and the witch could not do a thing to move it. She ranted and raved, and switched and thumped, and danced up and down in frustration as though her shoes were as hot as coals. At least, she assured herself, there was no one to see her make such a fool of herself. But then it was that she heard, from the direction of the pond, a loud croak that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.

"The witch spun around and saw, sitting on a lily pad in the middle of the pond, a large toad, its eyes wet with laughter. 'You dare laugh at me?' she screeched. The toad watched her with a wordless grin.

"The witch spent some time marching up and down the edge of the pool deciding what spell was terrible enough to punish the amused amphibian. At last she turned, and said, flicking out at the toad with her wand, 'I give you a mind to think and a tongue to speak!'

"'That does not seem so very bad,' laughed the toad, trying out words for the first time.

"'Indeed not,' smirked the witch. 'Except that I gift you also with a heart to love. You may search the world but you will never find another frog to love you in return for they will think you are a loud-mouth know-it-all!'

"And thus has been by sad fate, Kate."

He looked up expecting to have made her smile but instead she frowned.

"Guglielmo, why do you lie to me?"

"To tell the truth would break my heart in two."

She sat on the window ledge beside him and lifted him into her lap so she could stroke his back. "We could bind up your heart in iron bands, and then you could tell me. My father's man has had it done, so they call him Iron Henry; we could ask him how."

"My heart's just fine as it is, thank you."

Kate sighed. "I don't like there being secrets between us. You are my closest friend and I love you. You know that, don't you?"

"I love you too."

"So you should be able tell me anything!"

"Look, the song's changed and here comes your husband to collect you." Guglielmo wriggled in relief and her fingers slipped from him onto the window sill. He flicked his golden gaze up and back, and caught her eye. "Trust me, Kate. Just trust me that this is the one secret best kept to myself."


	16. Farewell, My Lovely

_Smoking is not cool and it will kill you. The characters forthwith are fictional and cannot die of lung cancer; you are not and can. _Capice_?_

* * *

**Farewell, My Lovely**

Mr Hansom was a man with a chin roughly the size, shape, and solidity of a brick, and, if he'd had a mind to cultivate it, the soul of a poet.

His associate was one Mr Creeley who had a yen for amateur meteorology.

"Pressure's dropping. There'll be a storm before dawn."

Mr Hansom didn't offer an opinion.

"Likelihood of hail too, and there we'll be stuck in the middle of it with a stiff to weigh us down."

Mr Creeley's continued complaints about the job interested him even less.

"A red sunset of course means a clear day ahead – but then the man who first said there's an exception to every rule was no dope." Mr Creeley tested the air against a raised finger. "Yeah, wind's in the north. The sea's sucking all the air off the land and that'll bring the clouds over." He shoved his hand back in his pocket and stomped his feet for something to do. "Never did like northerlies; makes the world feel screwy."

"Yeah," agreed Mr Hansom. His voice was quiet and deep and gave Mr Creeley the shivers. "An indrawn breath waiting to shatter."

"Yeah," echoed Mr Creeley, and tapped out a light, broken tattoo with his heel upon the brick wall he was slouching against.

Mr Hansom took a small wallet out of his inner jacket pocket, opened it, and removed a thin sheet of rice paper, and a filter which he held between his teeth. Replacing the wallet, he pulled a tobacco tin from his trouser pocket and began the careful balancing act needed to transfer a thin trail of tobacco from tin to paper then return the tin to his pocket. After laying down the filter with a brief tilt of his head, Mr Hansom started rolling the cigarette gently but firmly, forming a perfect even cylinder. He licked the loose end of paper with an almost secretive movement, his tongue barely appearing between his lips, and smoothed it down until the join was indistinguishable.

Moving the cigarette from his right hand to his left, Mr Hansom reached out to way-lay the girl passing by the alleyway he and Mr Creeley were loitering in.

"Excuse me, miss. You got a light?"

She had skin the colour of Irish cream, drawn tight across her cheekbones by a shadow of despair, and in that moment he fell in love with her. It was too bad he had to kill her.

Her eyes skittered to Mr Creeley then back to him and she shook her head.

"That's alright. I'm Mr Hansom, this is Mr Creeley. You're Virginia Cowl."

She said nothing.

"_Madonn'_, how d'you know it's her? You can't go around stopping any doll who walks past and telling her she's the hit," protested Mr Creeley, nudging at Mr Hansom with his elbow.

Mr Hansom blinked slowly. "You're Miss Cowl?"

The girl shook her head again with a jitter and took two quick steps backwards. Mr Hansom placed a gentle arm about her shoulders and herded her further down the alleyway. Her bones felt as light and delicate as spun sugar.

"Hey, break it up, she'll start screaming any minute," warned Mr Creeley. "Keep your trap shut, kid, it won't do you any good if you are who he says."

"As Mr Creeley says, Miss Cowl, no loud noises," said Mr Hansom. "Suffocation is a terrible way to go."

The gaze which rose to meet his was weary and resigned. She nodded, more in acknowledgement of the empathy he offered than in agreement with his prediction.

"You still don't know–"

"Miss Cowl, would you mind humouring Mr Creeley?" Mr Hansom enquired. "Just a few words."

"What do you want?"

Shards of light slipped between her lips. Sapphire, ruby, emerald. She continued watching Mr Hansom instead of looking to see where they fell, as if they didn't matter. He didn't take his eyes off her, because they didn't. Mr Creeley thought about crouching down and making sure to gather them all up but felt Mr Hansom would feel that that would break the mood.

"The king finds you something of an inconvenience, Miss Cowl."

"I might have guessed." She spoke no louder than a whisper; the jewels which fell from her mouth were no larger than her fingernail.

"What did you expect, bright eyes, in a country that runs on the gem trade?" Mr Creeley asked her. "You gum up the works, running about flooding the ice market–"

"Thank you, Mr Creeley," Mr Hansom broke in. "Go keep a look out."

Mr Creeley muttered indignantly but shambled back to the mouth of the alleyway. Virginia Cowl and Mr Hansom considered each other until Mr Creeley's footsteps stopped. The moon found a gap in the clouds, and the alley was suddenly a clear cut world of silver light and black-as-black shadows. Mr Hansom took her hand and led her further from the main street. Once her hand was released, Virginia Cowl wrapped her arms around her stomach and rocked, a small motion, forwards and back. Mr Hansom admired the dark fans inked upon her cheekbones by the shadow of her eyelashes.

"I've been waiting for someone like you for weeks," she confessed. "Jumping at shadows, listening for footsteps. Are you going to have that?"

He looked down at the cigarette still between his fingers and passed it to her. Lifting a matchbook from his breast pocket, he broke a match off, struck it alight against the sole of his shoe; offered her that as well. "I've been waiting for someone like you my whole life."

She leaned back against the alley wall, balancing her weight on her right leg, the other bent at the knee. The heel of her left shoe dug at the crumbling mortar. She took a hard drag and let smoke stream out of her mouth, up into the night sky. "So much softer. You know, I was just going to get milk. My family aren't going to have any milk for breakfast tomorrow."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Miss Cowl."

"Yeah, well. My stepmother won't drink black coffee, and this whole," she waved her hand drawing a couple of fuzzy smoke rings in the air, "_thing_... I mean, it's not something you'd want to deal with without caffeine."

"Your family will have bought milk themselves in the month or so it will take for your body to be found. We're professionals, Miss Cowl."

"You, sure. But Mr Creeley..."

"Mr Creeley's still learning; got to make allowances."

Virginia snorted softly and spat out a small topaz. She stubbed the butt of the cigarette on the bricks next to her hip, admired the neat way it concertinaed. Pushed off the wall and loosened up her shoulders.

"Make it clean, Mr Hansom. I trust you not to let me suffer."

-.-.-

Mr Hansom made his way back to the entrance of the alleyway where Mr Creeley stood, shoulders up around his ears, hiding from the rain which had started drizzling sullenly.

"Easy as pie," Mr Creeley laughed. "Dumb broad."

Mr Hansom's fist brought him down like a half-ton of bricks.

"We get the spring cleaning done then you scram." He rubbed his knuckles absentmindedly. "I've got to buy some milk."


	17. 29

_Why don't the newscasters cry when they read about people who die?_

_At least they could be decent enough to put just a tear in their eyes._

- The News; Jack Johnson

* * *

**29**

Georgia stopped in the act of wrestling with the tiny buckle on her new dancing shoes, arrested by the television.

Five of her sisters were already seated in front of it, watching the neatly suited man recite sombrely above glaring white-on-red letters: BREAKING NEWS.

"... confirming a second explosion at the Arding-Scott military base of even greater intensity than the first," he intoned. "At 2:37 this afternoon the explosion rocked the base, following the initial blast last Friday which trapped twenty-nine soldiers. Experts on the scene say that no one could have survived ..."

Georgia's hand flew to her mouth. And hard on its heels a second later, the thought _who exactly was she performing for?_ Did she want one of her sisters to turn around and admire how very sensitive she was, how pretty and delicate she was in her shock? Was this actually how her grief expressed itself or was she just copying what she had seen actors on t.v. doing?

When the tears hit they didn't make any sense. She knew none of the dead men, and had been no more than abstractly concerned when reports of the first explosion had appeared. Some of her friends, on facebook, had changed their profile pictures to candles in support of the trapped soldiers, but she hadn't even done that much. It didn't feel right – presumptuous, maybe even a bit histrionic, to pretend a connection when there were people who really did know them. A stiff upper-lip was her way of dealing with remote troubles. And here she was, tears sliding down her cheeks, uncomfortably wet beneath her chin, dripping on her collarbones. Real grief or self-indulgence?

"... the family and friends must have known, since last Friday, deep down in their hearts," a different neatly suited man was saying, in front of a street scene instead of a tidy news studio backdrop, "that this would be the outcome ..."

She almost sneered. He would have stood where he stood now and said exactly the same thing if the opposite outcome had occurred.

It went on for hours, the news coverage. Of the explosion, of the Prime Minister's address, the families, a candlelit vigil, and a message from the Pope – mourning the loss and deploring the state of war in equal measure. She couldn't stop crying and she didn't know why.

They showed a list of the soldiers' names and their pictures. Parker Lydell, twenty-seven, who had been a rugby rep for his province. Alistair Jermakoff had been expecting the birth of his first child. Sam Arapeta, the brother of Rangi Arapeta who was one of only two who had made it out after the initial explosion. (_He'll hate himself_, she thought, _he'll hate that he survived when his baby brother is dead_.) And the youngest, Michael Stargazer, only eighteen. Georgia couldn't have said why she remembered him, long after she forgot all the others. Maybe it was because he had a funny last name or because they were exactly the same age only she was going to get older. Maybe it was because he was cute. With his blonde buzzcut, sure grin and dreaming eyes, he was the kind of boy she would have smiled at if they'd seen each other across a bar, a party, a hallway at school. Ogling dead boys, and she'd been going to sneer at the newscaster.

"Hey, get your other shoe on. Let's go."

Georgia blinked and looked over to her eldest sister standing before the black hole of the door that wasn't a door, the door that didn't make sense. Through the doorway, she knew, was darkness – steps that had to be carefully negotiated, sight unseen – and at the very bottom a smattering of refracted light off silver leaves. The door had appeared out of nowhere and it had made her believe that fairy tales were true.

But tonight, fairy tales didn't cut it. Twenty-nine men were dead – what the hell was wrong with the world?

That was when she realised why the unstoppable tears. On the news, twenty-nine was a number for people who got rescued. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands – those were the big unpicturable, _unreal_ numbers that disaster-struck people died in on the news. But twenty-nine (photographs and names, ages and hometowns) that was a number for soldiers who were pulled from the ashes, worse for wear but smiling wearily, in a happy miracles-do-happen piece. She had never, not for one second since the first report last Friday, considered that they would not all get out alive.

"Georgie?"

"Tell them I'm not coming. I can't dance tonight."

Her sisters exchanged glances, and her eldest sister came and touched the back of her hand to Georgia's forehead, but in the end they left her behind.

She cried herself to sleep on the couch, a pillow hugged to her stomach, the television flickering with the faces of dead men, and her new shoes discarded on the floor.

* * *

_I was going to write this idea the other way around but then - as anyone reading from New Zealand at least will have recognised - Pike River happened, and when I don't know what to do I pray and I write, so._


	18. The Importance of Being Maniacal

_For the Captain of a Fantastic nature. 'Pologies to Oscar in advance._

* * *

**The Importance of Being Maniacal**

Elaine sat on the window seat in her bedroom overlooking her neighbour's backyard and verdant vegetable patch. The child in her belly squirmed.

It did that every so often and while most of the time it was followed by a great flood of love and wonder and absolute bloody terror that slammed into her so hard it left her senseless, occasionally among the flotsam and jetsam that was left of her wits in its wake was the bizarre knowledge that there was another person inside her. A tiny little human with thoughts and dreams and a future, and hair! There was hair and fingernails growing in her stomach. Not to mention that no one had warned her about her tummy button. When the good Lord saw fit to give you an inny it was supposed to stay _in_.

And since all this strangeness was her cross to bear, she felt perfectly justified to give in to the occasional whim, desire and desperate craving. And what she really wanted now . . .

A breeze gusted past, ruffling the rich green leaves of her neighbour's rapunzel as a man would his lover's hair.

What she really wanted was a muffin. Ye gods, she'd kill for a muffin.

-.-

The next morning, Elaine sat with her husband at the breakfast table heaped with more muffins than a person could possibly eat in a month of Sundays.

"I mean honestly, Timothy, it's like the Great Wall of Carbohydrates."

"And you the despotic emperor who ordered it built."

"I'm not kidding; I can barely look at them. I need something _green_."

Tim picked up a muffin, broke it in half and began buttering it.

"Did you hear me? I said I wanted something green."

He took a bite and said with his mouth full, "What type of green?"

"Oh, I don't really have a preference. But who would not see this pile of tan and stodge–"

"I did my best; they're harder than they look."

"I'm sure you did, but who could look at it and not wish for something clean and fresh and green? You know, I happened to look out the bedroom window this morning and–"

"Forget it, honey. Our neighbour's a witch."

"But it's so beautiful, and it _glows _in the sunlight, all healthy and nutritious – it would be so good for the baby. I _need_some rapunzel."

"Not going to happen, gorgeous."

"Then I will _die_ and you will have _killed_ me." Elaine collapsed upon the table, scattering baked goods, as the baby squirmed in agreement.

Tim took another bite of his muffin.

"And I can't see how you can sit there calmly eating muffins when I'm on the shaky precipice of starvation. I think you perfectly heartless."

"Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. I'd get butter all down my front, and I need this shirt clean to wear to your funeral if it's so immanent."

"I still say it is perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all in the circumstances. And you're keeping them all to yourself!"

She snatched the muffin out of his hand and he gave her a look.

"I said it was perfectly heartless of you under the circumstances. That is entirely a different thing."

But the sight of the muffin in her hand, which really was of a rather stodgy nature, was so distressing she cast it from herself across the room. "I want _rapunzel._"

"Well, off you go then," was her husband's advice.

She glared at him. "I am great with child."

"And I'm long-suffering with maniac but you don't see me making a big song and dance about it."

All at once she burst out laughing and flew around the table to kiss him long and hard. "I am so ridiculously in love with you, Timothy. Even when you taste of muffin."

He grunted and reached for another one. "An absolute maniac."

"Of course, that's why you love me."

-.-

Which is how Tim, cursing the desertion of his wits, found himself the next day with one leg over his neighbour's wall and said neighbour observing his compromising position from the tomato plants she had been weeding with a decided lack of hospitality.

"Hello, um," he said. "I'm Timothy McVae, um, one of your neighbours from, well, over the wall as it happens. Ha ha."

His neighbour was not inclined to laugh.

"Right. Well then ... did you know that your door-knocker might be broken, because I've been knocking away on that thing for a good ten minutes ... though if you were out here that might explain ...?"

Tim slung his other leg over the wall and dropped to the ground because, you know, hanging, lamb and/or larger farmyard animal, et cetera.

"Listen, I've got bit of an odd request. You see, my wife, Elaine, she's pregnant and, um, gets these cravings and right now it's for a bit of your rapunzel – she can see it out the bedroom window, 'glowing' apparently – and I was wondering if, um, you might be willing to give us some, perhaps, please?"

His neighbour raised her eyebrow.

"Here." He reached behind him for the basket he had left balanced on the top of the wall. "I brought you some muffins in case you wanted to trade – I mean, they're not much because I made them but if you wanted to, um ..."

"And I suppose," his neighbour spoke finally in withering tones, "that your wife, this Elaine, asked you very sweetly and is even now languishing upon her bed waiting for you to come back."

"What, no! Elaine's been making my life a living hell but I would have stuck to my guns about it except I spotted her this morning heading towards the wall with a step-ladder and if I'd stopped her she'd only have bided her time 'til my back was turned so I figured I might as do the deed myself properly. She's over there now. Say hello, Elaine."

"Hello! Pleasure to meet you," came Elaine's voice from the other side of the wall.

"Don't be fooled by the manners, she's actually the wrong side of maniacal."

"How far along is she?" asked his neighbour.

"Six months or so."

She considered. "I well remember second trimester cravings. Is there double chocolate chip in that basket?"

"Absolutely – the best kind, if I do say mysel–"

His neighbour nodded regally, strode to the wall and called over it, "Now, Miss Elaine, are you keeping your young man on his toes."

"Yes, ma'am! Don't know what the appendages are for if a person isn't being kept upon them."

Tim shook his head in disgust and his neighbour gave him a too-knowing look.

"We maniacs must stick together, Mr McVae," she informed him, and turned towards the rapunzel patch.

* * *

_It occurs to me that one of the morals of Rapunzel is that you will lose your baby if you're so weak as to give in to those womanly craving-things. Hah._


	19. About My Bad Reputation

**About My Bad Reputation**

The note Franklin sent in reply read:

_Dear Sir,_

_I would be willing to listen to a business proposition but abhor clichés on principal. We shall meet either at your offices or in any well-lit public restaurant you can suggest in which business meetings are usually held. I am no fool, sir, which is, I suspect, one of the reasons you wish to speak to me in the first place. Few things could tempt me into a seldom used stable-yard after midnight and the suggestion of a bold endeavour is certainly not one of them. Even if that suggestion comes from one Michael Marcus Lucius, Esquire. Or perhaps I mean _particularly_ if._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Franklin_

__

...

After leaving the lady in black, Franklin had returned home to find it burnt to the ground and her father and sisters living in the pig sty. They had at some point come into possession of a gold apple, a carding comb, and a gold spinning-wheel. Franklin forbore asking exactly how it had transpired and made a decision. Though the pampering palace of the lady in black was no fit place for her, there was probably nowhere else in the world she could leave her family without being in constant anxiety of their safety. So she had gathered them and their few possessions up and marched them all over to the lady in black who welcomed them with open arms and shrill effusions of delight.

Then Franklin her set out into the world to seek her fortune. Instead she found twelve princesses who could not be made to understand that it was not at all practical to dance themselves to an exhausted death – and wouldn't they prefer to be able to choose their own husbands rather than being contracted to the next person to waltz in with a cloak of invisibility? – despite many lectures upon the subject. Not even the detailed footnotes could reach them. It was among that royal dizzy dozen that Franklin made another decision. She hated the noise of petticoats; it set her teeth on edge. Such a girly, useless noise. Such a noise that would never _do_ anything, never amount to anything but the quiet everyday tasks of well-brought-up young ladies.

And so when a note arrived containing the words 'bold' and 'endeavour' in the same sentence, she answered quickly though with no less than her usual thoughtfulness.

...

It was not until they had reached the cheese platter and coffee that Michael Marcus Lucius, Esquire, came to the point.

"You have a certain reputation, Miss Franklin, for altering the course of stories."

"A reputation which does not take into account my latest endeavour then."

"The odds were against you; twelve to one, that's hardly fair."

Franklin heard the rustle of petticoats. "You're too kind, sir."

"No, Miss Franklin, not kind; just laying out things as I see them. A realist is what I am, and a canny one at that if I do say so myself."

"Yes, you just did. What is it that you want me to do, sir?"

Michael Marcus Lucius steepled his fingers beneath his chin. "To stop a breaker of hearts, to stop a stealer of tarts; to dance with the devil and win."

"Perhaps you should find a gymnastically-inclined priest; I am sure he would better serve your purpose."

"You don't know Jack."

Franklin felt the chill winds of fate nip at the nape of her neck, and didn't appreciate the familiarity. "Jack?"

"Let me tell you a story of a boy named Jack," began the merchant.

"Jack is a lazy lay-about, the regret of his mother's life. And yet Jack has the luck of the devil, always in the right place at the right time, again and again and again. Now it happens that I have had some trouble doing business in parts around the place – you see, I'm not trying to hide anything, Miss Franklin. This is straight-talking 'cause I know you wouldn't appreciate anything less. So I've taken my business to the land above the clouds and am sincerely doing my best to help the good people up there acquire such goods and services as will be of use to them. But one of my customers, one of my finest customers comes home the other day, and what does he smell? I think you know. He smells the blood of an Englishman, the blood of a certain tricksy will-o'-the-wisp of an Englishman come to steal my customer's hard-earned possessions. And for what reason? For greed, nothing but greed and covetousness. Now, Miss Franklin, I think you know how the story goes, and I ask you: is that fair? Is it _fair_, Miss Franklin?"

"No, I don't suppose it is." Franklin ate the last of the crackers she had prepared with a slice of brie and half a grape.

"Is that all you have to say?" He was incredulous, just a touch blustery.

"How exactly does your customer earn his possessions?"

"Driving grannies to church on Sunday, what difference does it make?"

"I imagine," she mused, "that you promised you could fix this, that you had _just_ the ticket, that that young whippersnapper wasn't a match for you. Perhaps even you gave yourself an improbable deadline because giants make you feel so small and you wanted to show them whom is the _man_. And here's the deadline looming all big and scary, and you with nothing to show for yourself . . ."

"_Will you or won't you_?"

"Won't, sir. You're on your own." She dusted crumbs from her fingertips and reached for her napkin.

"And there I was thinking you would be one to grab life by the balls."

Franklin dabbed her mouth and folded the napkin beside her plate in a way so neat and precise that it boded no good for her companion. "I beg your pardon?"

"My principal philosophy, Miss Franklin: When life comes at you roaring, cut off its balls and you'll come up smelling like roses. I thought you might be a kindred spirit but _perhaps_ you're a coward like the rest of them."

If it had not been for the fact that no part of Franklin's body would ever act outside their nature, and certainly not in such a showy melodramatic fashion, Franklin's eyes might then have flashed like swords. "Sir, I find you disgusting, bigoted, and insulting – but worse still, you are what I cannot abide: a hypocrite. You slink through the blind back alleys of the world, Michael Marcus Lucius. You would not have the courage to shake life by the hand let alone threaten its goolies."

"There you're wrong, Miss Franklin; did you never hear about my run-in with a talking Beast?"

She had risen from her chair, but the capital letter arrested her. "A talking Beast? Who lives in a castle with a rose garden, and demands fathers that they give up their daughters?"

"Yep, that's the one – I am quite the celebrity."

"To the contrary, sir, I had no idea you had met the Beast. Tell me, what did you say?"

"Say what?"

"What did you say, when he asked for your daughter?"

"Well." Michael Marcus Lucius sprawled back in his seat, cracked his knuckles and grinned. "He comes roaring at me right, but I look up slowly, straight into those beady eyes and I tell the giant furball, 'No. There's nothing in this world that could part me from my little girls. You can kill me but you can't have my kid, oh no. And you'll have it on your conscience that you've left three of the sweetest young ladies to ever breathe fatherless and destitute for your pains.' And then I gave him the old one-two, knocked him down and strolled away."

Franklin spent some time in consideration of his insistently honest expression. "Then, sir," she finally decided, "we have an accord. I'll get your Jack."

* * *

_What's that? The beginning of an epic has commenced, you say?_

_This story was originally written as a birthday present (so if there was something you thought might have been a joke but didn't really get, that would be why) and it is with the very kind permission of the birthday girl that I have posted it here._

_APOLOGIES! That last line of lies told by Michael Marcus Lucius, Esquire, begins practically verbatim with lines of a poem from bread and coal's _Monster_, a wonderful collection of poetry that she so cruelly deprived we, the wonderers now wretched, of._


	20. I am Learning to Abandon the World

**I am Learning to Abandon the World**

She hears her best friend calling and she runs to the window. Palms flat, wrists strong to lift her up so she can lean far, far out the window. From the highest room of the tallest tower, she can see her best friend in the garden, yelling and shouting and waving.

_come here come on – come out come out wherever you are_

Spinning, turning to run to the door and down down down the stairs, the pain stops her. Her wrist is caught, bound tight in vines and thorns. The drop of her blood blooms into a rose, naked and fat.

She tears the petals off the rose, one by one. Unwinds the vine.

There is outside to see, to go.

...

In the way of dreams she knows it is her lover calling. She has never had a lover but she knows their voice.

She is called by her name; the secret one she gave herself, held tight to her chest, greedy and selfish, never sharing it with anyone. She runs through the rose garden following her name.

_come away with me in the night – come away with me_

Reaching the garden wall, arms wrap around her waist, holding her as she climbs up, out. And then the pain, because they are not arms they are rose vines and the thorns score her skin. Red furrows dug into the flesh of her belly and hips. She pulls herself free of their embrace.

She pauses on the top of the wall to dab away the blood, then looks beyond.

...

There are no voices here. She does not need them.

The stars above her are scattered in darkness so wide and deep that it swallows her whole, and she is a pair of eyes adrift, pupils stretched wide and trembling to accept the sky.

She is no part of her body but her eyes; she cannot feel herself breathe.

Then, from far away, a faint stab of pain in her ankle. She her eyes looks down and there is a rose vine wrapped around her foot.

And she loves the roses, and she hates the roses, because they are the only thing keeping her here.

...

The prince surveys the rampant rose vines under which he is promised is a castle, and a wife.

He sees the rusted blade of a sword too puny for the task and abandoned. The hacked wreckage of tunnels begun and never finished. The glint of white bones trapped among the vines. They seem to wait, cruel and slightly blood-thirsty even in harsh midday sunlight.

The prince surveys the rampant rose vines then turns to the captain of his guards.

"Burn them," he says. "Burn them all."

...

His kisses do not wake her. Nor does what he tries next. Her children suckling cannot wake her because she is too far gone.

Gone.


	21. Her Eyes were Green

**Her Eyes were Green**

_Beloved,_

_These fine eyes of mine see right through you. You may pretend for all the world that you are greatest, the strongest, the oh so toughest but you can't fool me. Your heart is as soft as mine. Don't bother denying it, _I know_._

_Are my eyes really a particularly hopeful shade of green? Truly?_

_You have my heart. Take a care with it for I only have one and it is yours, all of it._

-.-

_Beloved,_

_Thank you for my flowers. I shall have to give you some of your own in return – I want you to fall asleep breathing in a reminder of me, as I do you._

_Of course it might have been even better if they hadn't been needful in the first place. Your father told me a funny thing. He said he'd asked you to forgo your ride and be at council today and that you had said 'I damn well will ride whenever I please' and taken off. I told him he must be mistaken because my love is not a petulant boy. I love a man._

_So where were you, beloved?_

_I am yours as you are mine._

-.-

_Beloved,_

_I haven't caught my breath yet and my lips still tingle. Next time it is my turn to mark you._

_I met your mother while I was flushed and giddy, and she must be furious with you because she did not hesitate to tell me that you strolled in late last night with a smile and a sneer, and when questioned you said 'I damn well will play as hard and fast and long as I wish'. I trust that her fury twisted your meaning because my love is not an insecure youth who needs to beat others at their games. I love a man._

_Where do you turn when you're not with me, beloved?_

_Until next time._

-.-

_Beloved,_

_How is it that a voice that sings so sweetly to me can be used at a moment's notice in anger? Sometimes I feel I am your only champion, and I do not mind, I would fight to the death for you. But why is it that no one will believe me that there is good in you – why do you only sing for me?_

_I have seen the bruises on your valet, your dresser, your groom, your tiger, your horses, your dogs. I am not supposed to look but I have seen them. They say you damn well will be the death of someone yet. Can it be that I am wrong? Because I know my love is not a vicious brute. I love a man._

_Where are you going, beloved?_

_Your song is a trespass. Trespass._

-.-

_Don't come near me. Do not step a foot within my presence until I have found the heart to forgive you. If what she says is true that will be some time yet._

_My love is not a selfish, callous, spiteful, pitiless, rat-bastard beast. I damn well love a man. _

_So _where_ is my beloved?_

**-.-**

I don't take your point, the enchantress said as she lowered the letters.

The beast smirked.

My point? My point is that your curse cannot be broken. My love had the eyes to see me - me, at my worst - and yet believed in my best. And you throw this pretty little girl at me? She cannot do it; she doesn't love me - she loves her father, any fool could see it.

What does that girl know? She has seen – what? A tame house pet, a broken animal, a miserable self-pitying creature my love would not even recognise? A shadow of a man on his best behaviour.

And what has she had to fight? Shadows and cobwebs, not rumours and snide remarks. Not the concerned opinion of those she holds dear. Not the slow sorrow of disillusionment.

No, the woman who could break this curse died years ago.

I don't want this, this girl, this pretend love.

Her eyes are blue.


	22. Silence and Other Love Poems

_Dear Foosemittee, what have you done to me? Four hours to write a story? Thanks for the inspiration._

* * *

**Silence and Other Love Poems**

_one_

When Estelle was four, she tipped a column heater over onto her foot, and it bit the flesh of her big toe to the bone. Her eldest brother, Henry, picked her up and carried her to her bed.

"Does it hurt?"

She shook her head.

Henry raised an eyebrow. "I'm going to go call Dad. Will you be alright by yourself for a tick?"

She nodded. "I love you."

"Yeah, me too, but you need to be more careful – and _think_ before you go playing with things that are heavier than you."

"Love you," she said again in a tiny voice.

He ruffled her hair.

_two_

"I love you!" she told Yossa.

"Really?" he said.

"Yes."

"Are you _sure_?"

"Yes," she pouted.

"Really sure or just kind of sure?"

"I'm really sure."

"Gee, I don't know..."

"I really _do_ love you!"

He laughed and picked her right off her feet to give her a hug. "What a coincidence, 'cause I love you too!"

"Really?"

Yossa looked at her then burst out laughing all over again.

_three_

It was when she was nine that Estelle discovered how easy it was to make her brothers cringe.

"I love you," she told Hamish, and he blushed.

"I really do love you," she said, laying her head on his shoulder. He took it manfully and remained stoic.

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and leaned her whole weight on him. "I loooove you thiiiis much!"

Estelle cackled as he fought his way free and raced from the room.

_four_

George woke up to a room full of balloons and his sister sitting on the end of his bed. "I'm going back to sleep."

Estelle poked him.

"What."

"It's George Appreciation Day. The day when we appreciate how wonderful you are and how much we love you."

"I'd appreciate if you let me sleep."

Estelle picked up her ukulele, and sang to the tune of Three Blind Mice, "_George, George, George, I love George. George, George, George, we all love George. Georgie-porgie, Georgie-George! We love him like a fire in a forge! Oh, George-porgie, Georgie-George. We! Love! George!_

"That," she informed him, "was the first verse of the George Appreciation Day Song."

"There are more?" he asked with growing horror.

At that point his brother's entered the room and began the second verse (arranged for voice and bad beat-box).

"I hate you all," George muttered as he pulled the covers over his head.

_five_

At fourteen, she had fully come into the powers of the little sister.

"Pookie-bear! Phone for you!"

Charlie's head appeared around the doorway of his bedroom glowering. "Call me that in front of one of my friends and it'll be the last stupid decision you make in your short stupid life."

Estelle beamed at him.

"And don't you try and blackmail me. Hamish is a pushover, I'm not."

"I'd never betray you, pookie-bear," she promised, passing the phone over. And the moment she took her hand off the mouthpiece, shouted, "Because I love, love, _love_ you, Charlie, soooo much!"

_six_

"What? Are you going? Where are you going?"

"I'm going out with friends. I told everyone at dinner."

"No, you didn't. Wait. _Wait!_" Estelle ran after Etienne, grabbed him round the neck in a hug. He kept moving towards the door and she hung off him, their feet stumbling over each other.

"I love you," she kissed the bit of his jaw she could reach. "Goodbye, I love you."

"Dude, I'm going to town for all of five hours, not Antarctica."

"Doesn't matter, I love you."

_seven_

"What if she doesn't like me?" Estelle asked Luke.

"She will."

"But what if she doesn't?"

"Then you've got seven brothers who'll beat her up for you."

"You're not allowed to beat up family."

"Says who? She's a step-mother, you're blood."

Estelle leaned against him. "Do you think I should change?"

"Sweetie" Luke drawled. "You really think you're going to look cuter in anything than your little yellow sundress? Relax, if she doesn't already know you're the sweetest girl that ever lived, then there's no hope for the woman."

He squeezed her shoulder. "All else fails, you've always got us."

"Thank you. I love you."

_swans_

She missed her brothers. She missed Henry's scoldings, and Yossa's laughter, and Hamish's sweetness, and George's gruffness, and Charlie's crankiness, and Etienne's irony, and Luke's compassion.

As swans they were exactly the same. Henry would waddle about poking at her stacks of firewood and starwort, and Hamish nestle nearby and tried ineffectually to help with her weaving. Charlie spent his time glaring at his reflection in the pond, disgusted by his beautiful white plumage. But her brothers were also wild birds that flew away and came back on a whim of their own, leaving her behind on the cold ground. Only once a year did she get to hear their voices, and hug them with no fear that she might break a delicate hollow bone.

And worst of all, she could not tell them that she loved them. She, who had said 'I love you' no less than seven times a day for as long as she could remember, was not allowed to make a sound.

So she wove it into the shirts she made, until they were more love poems than garments. The warp was the names they had been born with, said as only she could, and the weft the names she had given them, that only she was allowed to use. The scratch and itch of starwort was soothed by unspoken words.

Those words were almost uncontainable when they were with her. Watching Yossa poke and prod at George, they built up under her breastbone. Listening to Etienne and Luke trade insults and jokes until her belly ached with silent laughter, they clawed at her throat.

_I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you _"I love you."

She clapped her hands over her mouth. Shook her head _I didn't mean to_. But it didn't matter now.

"I didn't mean to, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I love you, I'm sorry. Please don't leave."

Her brothers gathered around her.

"It's okay, sweetheart," Luke told her. "We don't blame you."

"_Please._"

"Estelle."

She couldn't cry, couldn't breathe, couldn't speak.

"We have to go. We love you."

She clung to them until her fingers slipped from their smooth white feathers. And then she started to cry.

* * *

_Depending on which version you read, the number of brothers ranges from (the usual) six to eleven or more – and by the time I went and looked up the source I'd already written all seven brothers and couldn't bear killing one off, so._


	23. Dulce et Decorum Est

To black sheep, herd-strayers, wanderers, gaps and cunnans the world over, to all those who know a lie when they see it. To anyone, in fact, who has taken the king's shilling and shoved it right back down the king's throat. Let the gods, senators and ministers fight their own useless and bloody wars.

– _The Wanderer's Tale_; David Bilsborough

* * *

**Dulce et Decorum Est**

It wasn't like he had ever been fastidious but the filth and grime were slowly breaking his soul.

The tenches tried to eat him alive. Sometimes at night he could not tell what was him and what was the mud so he would take the bayonet on the end of his rifle and trace the outline of his body with pinpricks of pain. The haversack, ammunition rounds, helmet, grenades, gasmask, shovel, all the things he'd been given to carry only helped to bury him faster. He washed his face each morning, running the cloth over and over his features trying to tell if they were still his own. Before noon, they would be stolen again by the raw earth. There were days he swore he could feel his feet rotting away inside their boots.

In his breast pocket was a photograph of Sam and Harper. The grey and grainy development could not dim their smiles. Bullets could. A leg blown off by a grenade could. A gas attack Harper couldn't run from, and that he was too weak to do anything but escape from with his own life, could. The guilt was one more thing he carried.

But that night he dreamed not of screams and stench and being too slow – always too slow – but of eyes.

They were violet, which he had thought was a poet's lie, set in a mask of filigree gold. For a fraction of a moment he was caught in their gaze, but the moment passed and she – yes, she – looked right through him.

_Hurry! Hurry!_ called a voice and the girl spun and took off. He struggled to follow through the mud that filled his waking and his dreaming, sucked his feet raw and made his legs pump furiously uselessly.

But when he looked down there was no mud, only a path of silver sand through jewel-green moss. Suddenly he flew, he was faster than the wind. The white earth could not hold him.

He cannoned into the girl, she whirled, he whirled. He was showered with light. Dizzying blinding light refracted through leaves. It was a forest, they were in a forest where the trees grew diamonds.

_Hurry up, what are you dawdling for?_

What was he dawdling for, he ran and the girl ran beside him. They came to a lake, a lake with water so clear he could see the gold-pebbled bottom until the darkness of depth swallowed it. There were boats on the lake and men in the boats and women on the shore. And out, there, he could see, a palace in the middle of the lake lit with music and everyone wearing their finest to go to the ball.

He thought then of his uniform and looked to see if the dream-magic had changed it but his body wasn't there. He could feel the ground through his soles, and see the disturbance of sand but not the feet that made it. He gasped and swore. The violet eyes turned to him again, searching.

She was more brave than he and reached out to touch the empty air. He felt her fingers against his chest. Her eyes turned canny and she rubbed something unseen between her thumb and forefinger.

'An invisibility cloak, clever. Father didn't say there was another suitor come to try his luck.'

In the way of dreams, his mouth refused to open, his throat to make a sound.

'Or doesn't he know you're here? Very clever. If you'd be so kind,' her fingers again spread across his chest, 'give us another month so we can say our goodbyes and dance our last dances, then we shall be content to come home for good. Please?'

Because he could do nothing else he leant forward and kissed her lips. She consented for a moment then pulled back, his kiss and a wry smile lingering about her mouth.

'The successful suitor has full freedom of choice, but after that little display if you choose one of my sisters I will gut you and use the casing of your innards to make a new pair of gloves.'

She turned and flicked one hand out in farewell, then continued to the shore to allow one of the men there to hand her into a boat and cast off. He watched her until she disappeared within the palace of light.

When he woke, he felt the loss of her gaze upon him and of the weight of her fingertips against his chest. But it wasn't a sorrowful loss, it wasn't a weighted, gut-churning, numbing loss, it wasn't a loss that buried him alive. It was expectant and waiting.

The sky up above him was high and pearly grey as the sun waited beyond the curve of the earth to rise. The muddy wall of the trench he had rested against seemed nearly soft and comforting beneath him. And the scent of wet earth and churned grass reminded him of nothing more terrible than his mother's garden after a passing storm. In that moment, he could almost believe that it would all be over by Christmas.

* * *

_This is the story I was writing before I turned the idea around to write_ 29_. You know these are the ones that failed, right?_


	24. The Bloody Chamber

_until she came to the room full of skeletons, when Mr. Fox took up the burden of the tale, and said: It was not so, it is not so, and God forbid it should be so_.

– 'The Story of Mr Fox', an early English variant of 'Bluebeard'

* * *

**The Bloody Chamber**

Her husband was a large man – very tall and broad, with a voice that rumbled like a distant thunder and shoulders wide enough to block out the sun. His lips were thin, his nose a sharp blade, his jaw held perpetually tight. The only soft thing about him was the thick fringe of dark lashes that surrounded his adamantine eyes.

She could imagine the moment he won her from her father. A dark, smoke-stained room, two men opposite each other at a table covered in playing cards, harsh liqueur in thick glasses, ash trays and cigarette stubs, greasy food spilled carelessly from dirty plates. And in the middle of that table, a pile of notes and chips eclipsed only by the tower stacked carelessly by her soon-to-be-husband's elbow. Her father, pale and shaky, realising how much he had lost, how much he had promised without meaning to, would utter that same helpless, heartsick moan she had heard only once before as a black shroud drifted over the pale, still face of her mother. And then those thin lips of his would have tilted upwards at the corners, ever so slightly.

Could she ever forgive him for that smile?

He was a monster; she knew that as surely as she was sure of the sun. Who else would choose to live in this depressing ruin? A hundred rooms and not even a quarter of them occupied. Until she had come, had been surrendered to his will, he had lived entirely alone save for a skeleton staff (yes, she thought, _exactly_, a skeleton staff).

And who else would be so large? The size of him still amazed her, terrified her, made her heart pound beneath her breast and her mind swim dizzily when he came upon her unexpectedly. His presence suffocated her and even when he was not there he occupied all her thoughts. He treated her as gently as a china doll except for when he forgot his strength and left bruises upon her soft skin. He always apologised but she knew he didn't mean it. A man like that, who would ruthlessly win a man's daughter in a game of cards, whose eyes glittered hard like diamonds, would never apologise to anyone.

She remembered the night before he left when he told her he was going. He had sat her down in one of his preposterously big chairs that made her feel like a child, small and alone. He took the one opposite her, filling it up with his enormous frame. A fire had crackled in the grate nearby, casting flickering light about the room, deepening the shadows. It should have been cold, every room in this ruinous mansion should have been frozen with sly drafts, but warmth pressed upon her like a rug, no, like the pelt of a wild animal.

"I am sorry," he had said. He wasn't sorry. "Business forces me to leave you alone for a time. I wish you to have my keys until I return, there's one to every lock in our house."

The ring bristling with keys gleamed sullenly where he placed it on the table at her elbow. It had been early evening and the hard line of his jaw was shadowed blue with stubble.

"Perhaps you might take the time to make this place more your home; the steward will provide you with anything you might need. I have but one request."

He leaned over again, looming with the fire at his back, and touched a key on the ring, black and dull unlike any of its companions.

"Do not use this key. It is to my own room, at the end of the south wing, and I wish it to remain private."

Unable to think of any answer suitable to the time and place and encroaching shadows of the room and the man, she had nodded her head dumbly, lips trembling faintly.

She was not curious but rather certain that in that forbidden room lay the heart of the mystery of the man who was her husband. It was only to unearth that mystery that she approached that room, each step buoyed by exquisite trepidation.

The heavy black key turned in the lock and she felt the tumblers thudding into place. With rising dread so thick she could scarce breathe, she pushed the door and it swung slowly open.

oOo

She made certain she was wearing her best dress and had her hair up just so on the day her husband's letter had told her he would return. Soft pink lipstick made her pretty mouth sweeter than a rosebud. She washed her hands again to no avail. At the sound of his carriage, her feet flew from the room.

"I'm sorry," he began as he stepped down to the courtyard, but got no further as she flung herself into his arms.

"I'm so glad you've come home!"

"I would have returned sooner if I'd known what my reception would be." Cautiously, he touched his lips to hers in a butterfly-light kiss.

She sighed happily. "I missed you."

He seemed undone by her words and took both her hands to press kisses to them as was his habit. She twisted gently away and clasped them together in front of her. The black mark on her right palm burned. "Come, I have tea waiting for us in your study."

She chatted and charmed away an hour sitting with her large husband, serving him tea in pretty bone-china cups, and dainty biscuits. Sunlight poured in through the window and she basked in its warmth. Her husband raised a hand to his neck but lowered it before he did anything so uncouth as tug on his collar. She beamed at him and reached for the sugar bowl, unmindful of the mark on her palm.

His hand came down around hers and she was lifted bodily out of her seat as he pulled her towards him. "What is this?"

"Oh," she tried to slip her hand out of his grasp but he held fast. "I was dying some yarn and stained my hands. I can be so clumsy."

"What have you done?"

Her heart fluttered like a trapped bird. "Nothing!" She tugged but he would not let go. "Stop it, you're hurting me!"

"No, I'm not. Frightening you perhaps but I wouldn't hurt you."

Something in the way he said it made her look up at his face. His eyes were brimful of pain, and she thrilled a little that she had the power to do it.

"You opened my private room."

"Can I get you more tea?"

"I asked you not to." His hand still ensared hers.

"Tea would be just the thing."

"I have had enough tea, thank you."

"Well, I don't see why you should be so upset even if I had gone into your stupid room because there's not even anything in it!" she cried, and her hand was her own again. "Dust and cobwebs – why bother to keep it secret?"

A cloud dragged across the sun, leaching light from the room and the blue sheen from his hair, revealing dull, ordinary black. "It was not so much secret as private, I'm sorry."

"But you gave me the key and told me not to go in! I can't understand you at all. What kind of secret chamber has no bloodied bodies of innocent girls? What kind of castle has no drafts or strange noises or ghosts? What kind of monster apologies and drinks tea? What kind of story _is _this?"

He looked at her a moment then reached out and patted her shoulder awkwardly.

"This is not a story, my dear. This only is our life."

And there it was. The smile she had imagined so many times, the slight up-turning of his thin lips. But she had never imagined his eyes above it. His eyes so tired and old and sad.

* * *

_This door you might not open, and you did;_

_So enter now, and see for what slight thing_  
_You are betrayed. . . . Here is no treasure hid,_  
_No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring_  
_The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain_  
_For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,_  
_But only what you see. . . . Look yet again -_  
_An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless._  
_Yet this alone out of my life I kept_  
_Unto myself, lest any know me quite;_  
_And you did so profane me when you crept_  
_Unto the threshold of this room to-night_  
_That I must never more behold your face._  
_This now is yours. I seek another place._

- 'Bluebeard'; Edna St Vincent Millay


	25. Beauty and

**Beauty and**

Today is the day when I won't think of him.

I check my face once again in the mirror, that each feature is a perfect as I can make it. The butcher is coming and his determined charm is one of my small pleasures.

I replace my rouge pot to the left of a letter from my elder sister. She is inviting me to stay, supposedly to play with my nieces, but mostly because she – both of my sisters, actually – feel a flicker of guilt that their dowries and spirit found them good husbands while I live quietly alone in the little cottage in the country where we were all forced to live in too close quarters, but now with only flowers for company, and the butcher every other day.

They needn't worry. I love my little cottage so long as I don't remember my father being blown in one desperate night by the dregs of a storm. Or the diverless carriage that idled before the front gate ominous as twilight.

But I won't. Not today. Today is the day when I won't think of him.

_But it's you she thinks of in the hours while she's awake. / __She takes her lipstick from her case to make a smile._

The butcher is outdoing himself today, and I don't think I have laughed so much in at least a year. I wonder what the momentum is building towards, whether I should warn him that I will never do for any man, not anymore.

Still laughing, I shake my head and tell him I have chores to get done before the clouds come over. He reaches out and takes my arm and it's too late because I see my scar there, white between his reddened fingers.

I feel claws tearing at my skin, hot panting breaths against my neck.

I smell polished wood and blood and musky fur.

I hear his voice demanding and asking and threatening and begging for me to come back to him.

I taste my own fear.

And I know –_ I_ _know_ – my weakness, that I might still go back

unless I steel myself against it every morning,

replace every piece of myself scattered by dreams.

It's too late. I've remembered. For today, it's too late. He is pacing the confines of my mind again. Ten years or a hundred, I can't forget the Beast.

_And it's you she thinks of when she thinks of her mistakes. / __Regret's an open road that stretches out for miles._

But tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be the day when I don't think of him.


	26. Oh No, Not Me

**Oh No, Not Me**

Her plan, when it came down to it, wasn't a particularly complicated one, but Franklin was of a practical nature and had long been of the opinion that the more convoluted and supposedly clever a plan was the lesser chance it had of success and the greater chance the planner had of looking ridiculous. Besides, she knew her fairy tales and an enormous great beanstalk flourishing amidst the otherwise unremarkable countryside was rather hard to miss.

She knocked on the door of the cottage that huddled in the shadow of the beanstalk.

"Who is it?" caroled a voice from inside.

"My name is Franklin. I was wondering if Jack was at home, please?"

The door opened and a robust woman who would have been very pretty in her youth appeared. She held the door with one hand and put the other on her hip. Her hands were strong and worn. "Not at the moment but he'll be along in the winking of an eye. What's the lad done this time?"

"I just have a few questions about his visit to the land beyond the clouds at the top of the beanstalk."

Jack's mother sighed. "Well, you'd better come in and have a cuppa while you're waiting."

Franklin liked Jack's mother very much. Her kitchen was spotlessly clean, ruthlessly organized, and made a very good cup of tea (black, no sugar). She had created her own small business selling over-sized beans to pubs and other kitchens, and had recently expanded to cover most of the county as their size leant the beans to travelling well. Franklin had never known her mother but hoped she would have been like this woman.

Jack's mother had cleared away the tea things, and Franklin was helping her make a start on supper by peeling carrots, when there was a sound from outside then a thump as the door swept open and hit the wall.

The man in the doorway was tall and lean, bristled with energy, smiled like a fox, and possessed a certain indefinable quality that made a few more clichés make sense besides. His eyes were treacly-warm and utterly swoon-worthy.

If Franklin had been the swooning type.

Which she was not.

"Hans, my lad, this is Miss Franklin come to call on you. Mind your manners and take off those boots before you come crashing through my house."

"I swear I've never laid a hand on her in my life, mother," said Jack holding up both hands, "never even seen her before."

"None of your nonsense now. Miss Franklin isn't the breed of female to be carrying on like that as you'd be seeing if only you had eyes in that blessed daft skull of yours."

"How very disappointing; that breed of female and I get on so very well."

Jack's mother threw up her own hands and got on with the makings of supper. Jack smiled sweetly at her back, then turned to Franklin. "I recognize that expression. You've come to reason with me, haven't you? Well, come and do it on the doorstep then."

"That would hardly be reasonable, Mr . . .?"

"Oh, I know," agreed Jack. "It's your job to be reasonable and my job to thwart you at every turn, but we'll have such fun doing it. Come on, these boots are not allowed inside the house and I refuse to have an argument in my stockings so you'll have to come out here – oops, that was reasoned, wasn't it? Ruining everything already, that's all I ever do." His tone didn't suggest repentance of any kind.

"Mr . . . Jack," Franklin said quietly as she joined him and shut the door behind her, not wanting his mother to overhear, "it's my understanding that you are in possession of a bag of gold coins and a hen which lays golden eggs neither of which rightfully belong to you. I'm here to rectify that."

"Ah, you're one of the kind that thinks me an idiot reprobate, that's my least favourite kind. You're pretty enough you should be one of the others."

Franklin wondered what the other kinds thought about him, and in fact could have made a good stab at guessing, but she also knew a blatant attempt at diverting the subject when she heard one. "Thank you," she said briefly, because there were rules about receiving compliments however disingenuously given, but could go no further because he was laughing at her.

"Aren't you going to ask me what's so funny?" he said after several moments of rocking back and forth on his heels and slapping his knee.

Her eyebrow lifted briefly in disdain to say, _And give you the pleasure of smiling a secret satisfied little smile and telling me I wouldn't get the joke? Hardly._ Franklin's eyebrows had only grown more eloquent over the course of her travels.

"A cleverty-clever, disapproving, pretty girl, then – my mother, as ever, bless her soul, is quite right. You're not the breed of female I'm usually in the way of meeting, Miss Franklin."

"The hen and the coins, Mr … Jack? I'm sure we could have a marvelous conversation that spun about on its head for days and days, and you would enjoy yourself immensely, but your supper will be ready in only half an hour and I wouldn't want your mother to think I was keeping you from it. If you don't have them, then simply point me in the direction of where they may be."

"What I don't understand is why you're _here_ having a cup of tea with the old lady," mused Jack as though he hadn't heard a word Franklin had said, but added, "'Simply' is a synonym for 'boringly'."

Though it cut at her to do so, Franklin ignored his flagrant disregard for grammar. "Where are the coins and the hen? _Please."_

"Have you ever thought that your ignoring what I say and asking your questions regardless is an example of the exact same single-bloody-mindedness that I employ when _I_ ignore what _you_ say and ask questions regardless?" he wondered in the same tone a smiling man in a pressed white suit would use to say 'I only ever pay a fraction of what my prize is worth'.

She passed a hand over her eyes. "What is it that you want from me?"

"I want to know why you're here."

"I was asked to find you."

"But why _here_ here?"

"I looked at the thing sensibly for almost two whole heartbeats and headed in the direction of the giant beanstalk. It was almost as easy as falling off a log."

"Have you ever fallen off a log?"

"_No_."

Jack smirked. "And so you decided to call upon my mother? How fiendish of you."

"Logic is not fiendish, it's practical. You hardly seemed the type to be able to run a household by yourself so the likelihood was high that if you didn't actually live with your mother you still visited her often if only to get your washing done."

"Worse and worse. Routed by logic? I'm ashamed at myself."

"You know no shame, Mr . . . Jack, and have barely a passing acquaintance with embarrassment, reason, or really I think any other quality that might qualify you as a useful citizen."

"Then I'm fortunate Fortune favours me."

"You are the last thing from brave, Mr- Jack; fool-hardy and ill-considered more like. If one hasn't hasn't a thought for the possible outcomes one can hardly lay claim to courage."

"Wits quick as dash to the john, you have. No, darling, Fortune favours idiots, tricksters, and thieves – my mother once told me that – and I have the excellent good luck to be all three."

"Well, it's not holding today is it, your luck?"

"You're right; I wonder if it was something I did?" Jack bit his lip and made a show of looking injured. "I don't think anyone has ever found me before. Many have tried; countless giants and kings and cross fathers. So many traps have been set, and baitings laid, and I've evaded them all. And then a slip of a girl with bonny blond curls and eyes of clearest blue looks sensibly at it and gets herself invited for a cup of tea with my mother, brilliant. Tell me, how is it that you see us, Miss Franklin, we lesser mortals? The world must seem populated entirely by chickens running about trying to find their heads. Do you ever get lonely?"

Franklin reminded herself a number of times that she was a reasonable adult and losing one's temper never helped until she felt able to speak calmly. Deciding that looking him straight in the eye was the best way to go about things, she did so and he looked right back, gleefully amused.

"It must gall you that I'm just that little bit taller. I hope you don't plan to argue for long; you'll get a crick in your neck."

"Listen, Mr . . . _Jack_–"

"Jack's my professional name and I've taken too great a liking to you to have you spitting it in my face at every other opportunity. I'm Hans to my family, but you can call me Ivan." He smiled winningly.

She almost glowered. "They're all the same thing. They're just different transliterations of the same name."

"You only think they are, precious, but they're different in ways undreamt of in your philosophy, I promise you." He touched his finger to her chin and lifted it a fraction higher. "I would have you call me Ivan because, just occasionally, in Russian, I am a prince and above all you need Romance."

She gave him her best imperative stare, the one that made beasts, the weather, and slightly inebriated older men cower, but it left him unmoved as he watched her with treacly-warm, utterly swoon-worthy eyes.

If Franklin was the swooning kind.

Which she was not.

"I don't have time for such things."

He burst out laughing again, which did not best please her but at least he let go of her chin. "I'm not talking about rolls in the hay and other enjoyable activities, sweetling. Romance with a capital 'R'. A swirling, roiling deep desire for beauty and truth and freedom and love, not facts or literal meanings or preferred outcomes or anything so deadly dull as _logic_."

"But there is beauty in logic," she protested, "in the way things can fit together so neatly that they sing."

For the first time, his reaction seemed honest. He rocked back on his heels and shook his head as though his ears were full of water. His smile was like the dawn. "I do believe – I do indeed believe – that there is hope for you yet. It has been my very great pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Franklin, and one I intend to have again, if it please you." He took her hand and pressed it tightly between both of his. "Find me; don't fail me."

Before she could even draw herself up to demand just what he thought he was about being so uselessly cryptic, he had turned from her, and between one step and the next, he vanished.

Mother-rogering seven-league boots, the midden-eating son of a goldfish.

Franklin did the only sensible thing. She turned back inside the house to apologise to Jack's mother that he had to dash off again and ask if she might stay for supper.

* * *

_To continue the theme of writing Franklin stories about things in fiction which annoy me, conversations that go round and round in circles because no one has the clear-headedness to cut to the chase and say what they really mean. Which I'm sure I could have overturned if I had two characters as lovely as Franklin, or even Franklin and someone who had good intentions but was a bit of an idiot. Jack, however, is just willfully obtuse._

_The title should properly read _Oh no (no no no no no no) / Not me (me me me me me me)

_And EVA, don't think I've forgotten that I've promised you a story. I just needed to get this one out of the way first._


	27. Central

_It's not your Cindy._

* * *

**Central**

She negotiates her way through Manuka Gorge and is released into Central Otago, where her heart beats weighty and free. The hills, covered over with tough tussock, do not roll but sweep and gully like sculptured muscle. A landscape of leonine flanks broken by the black teeth of Central schist. Geology thrusting through the soil to be eroded by lathing winds, lichen-crusted. The heat is different, dry and redolent. She can feel at an almost molecular level the sun on her face baking her skin, the cells in her cheeks contracting microscopically. She can always feel more in this place of gold and black beneath the hot blue sky.

Her forearm is branded where it rests against the black rubber seal on the driver-door window, her elbow outside bullied and bustled by the slipstream. Where the road curves around the crown of a hill, she pulls over half into a dry ditch. The wheels crunch on loose gravel. The engine splutters off, the door opens and slams shut but the window is left down to catch the rich, warm air.

She climbs over the no.8 wire fence. Her right foot catches on it making her hop in place until she can lift free, but she makes it. She is now undoubtedly on private land, a vast sprawling acreage of sheep farm, but she has always felt that the land of Central was hers. Or that she was the land's. A dumb thought, she warns herself; she's never even lived here, grew up in Dunedin by the coast where the air is crisp and carries the suggestion of salt. The sense of familiarity in Central is a fabrication at best.

On the top of the hill, she clambers up a schist outcrop, grit rasping at her fingerprints. A tract of skin is scraped from her shin. As she sits, the sun burns into her jeans. She breathes and the land breathes too.

Her fist goes to her stomach and pushes hard. Does a foetus need to breathe? Could it feel that?

She tugs her phone out of her pocket. This all seems very spontaneous but she has a piece of paper in her other pocket with words like 'good faith', 'transference', and 'first trimester' on it. They are the words that she will forget and flounder for if she gets upset, and above all right now she wants to sound smart and together, so there they are captured in graphite between faint blue lines for easy retrieval.

The first time she thumbs in the number she hesitates so long over pushing the call button that the screen goes dark and the keypad locks and she has to begin all over again. This morning, she had almost been home when her foot started pulling further and further away from the accelerator and her mind went blank and she drove straight back out of Dunedin to here.

She dials again and forces herself to hit the call button at the end like it was the last number in the sequence. After a couple of seconds, she manages to bring the phone to her ear.

"Hello?" she says when the other end picks up. "Mum?"

"Annie?"

* * *

_Oh my goodness, you guys, am I ever homesick today. New Zealand is the best place in the whole entire world. Ever. And I'm in such a state today I'm not even going to apologise for thinking that. _

_So if you're wondering how any of the above relates to a fairy tale let alone one failing, the salient facts you need to be aware of are that in the original Rapunzel she's pregnant before she gets chucked out of the tower, and that aaages ago I wrote a story(ish) called _Rapunzel_ about a girl called Annie who goes missing. Yes, the link is very tenuous if not nonexistent. I don't care; I needed to write about home._

_(Do you know the bit at the beginning of the second LotR movie where Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas spend a long time running after the orc band that captured Merry and Pippin? That's Central. Alternately, if you're knowledgable about NZ films, it's where _In My Father's Den_ is set - EVA, it's definitely not child-appropriate.)_


	28. Love Shook My Heart

****_In the words of a very dear friend of mine, would you be so good as to take a moment and imagine me charging past your window, hair blowing wildly and arms thrown dramatically high, howling something along the lines of, "CAUTION TO THE WIND! WOOOHOO! _SHIT_ YEAH!"?_

* * *

**Love Shook My Heart**

Beauty ran through the forest, her heart pounding, her feet aching where her boots not made for desperate haste rubbed them raw. Her mind dithered in a spiralling gyre of panic.

Why hadn't she returned when she had promised she would?

Memories flashed through her mind like the trees that passed on either side – happy memories that made her stumble as did the roots twisting at her feet.

Her Beast, small and sleek and dark; tail lashing.

She sitting beside him on the grass outside, plaiting daisies and dandelions to hang around his neck.

The world turning over as they wrestled and then being pinned with the Beast, terrifying and wonderful, above her.

Lying side by side on her bed, her fingers heavy upon his pelt.

She gasped for breath as she came at last to the side gate, creaking open upon its hinges. One hand reached out to it, and she swung herself around the corner and used the momentum to push her tired legs onwards to the rose garden. The Beast would be in the rose garden; she knew that as surely as she knew her own name and the sound of his breathing. Surely as the sky was blue and water was wet. As surely as she knew she loved the Beast.

She stumbled to a halt, her knees trembling. The sight of her Beast a crumpled heap on the ground amidst fallen rose petals drove straight through her heart and into her stomach. She doubled over and retched, bile burning the back of her throat. Wiping her mouth and nose, she crawled to the prone figure and entangled her damp fingers in his fur.

"_No. _Beast, please, please don't be dead. I can't stand it."

Her forehead dropped to his chest. "I love you – don't ever leave me."

Warm silver light poured out from between her fingers. It refracted in the tears that flooded her eyes and filled them with rainbows. Beauty clung more tightly to her love and felt the sickening twists as flesh reshaped itself. Her fingers were set free as fur dissolved to reveal skin slick with perspiration. As the body beneath her gasped and drew a deep desperate breath, Beauty startled away and edged backwards until she was stopped by the prick and snare of a rosebush.

This person who had replaced her Beast was naked and trembling. Long, long black hair obscured blue eyes curiously blank, wrapped itself around smooth skin white as lilies, and tumbled over small, high breasts.

Beauty looked at herself and decided she could sacrifice her chemise, pulled it over her head and held it out to the woman. The woman blinked and expression welled in her eyes as her spirit resettled itself in her body. She took the chemise and slipped into it, her smile warm with gratitude.

"Thank you," she said.

"Think nothing of it," Beauty replied. "Is there anything more I can do for you?"

The woman stretched out her limbs, her entire body arching taut as a bow, then relaxed lazily and laughed. "So polite, my Beauty?"

Beauty frowned, puzzled. "How do you know my name?"

She laughed again.

"Were you one of the invisible servants in the castle? I don't understand what is happening."

"Oh, Beauty, dear heart –"

"Why are you saying that?"

"I –"

"Where is the Beast?"

The woman stilled. A breeze rattled through the rose garden, shaking the petals from fat, drooping heads.

"What have you done with my Beast?" Beauty asked again.

"I'm here; don't fret." The woman reached out reached out and twined her fingers in Beauty's hair. "Don't you know me?"

"No. No, you're – where is he?"

"Beauty, it's me."

"Stop _touching_ me!"

Fingers jerked back; eyes registered shock then hurt then a terrible bleakness. "Why are you doing this?"

"I want to know who you are."

"You said you loved me."

"_No!_" Beauty cried, curling her fingers into fists in the dirt, bruising fallen rose petals. "I did no such thing. I didn't!"

"I was dying and you saved me. Love was the only thing that could."

"I love the Beast," Beauty told her.

"And who do you think I am?"

"Not my Beast. He is, is..."

The woman leaned back on her elbows, painstakingly casual, and tipped her head to one side. "Male?" she suggested.

"_Yes._"

"Surprise!"


	29. song of the open road

**The beginning of the rest of the world.**

I left the girl in Pennsylvania today, she dropped me on the side of the road just out of Chambersburg.

I told her to stop the car and let me out because I realised for the first time in I couldn't even tell you how long I had nowhere to go.

I realised I had nothing to do.

I realised this was the beginning of the rest of the world.

.

**Destiny**

I was wandering along the side of the interstate like an idiot, so I was told later, when Destiny picked me up. She says she always picks up strays and wanderers, because there should be a mysterious, benevolent stranger named Destiny in every road trip. She wears feathers in her hair and doesn't ask a question more than once.

– What's your name?

And when I told her I didn't have one, she said – I'll call you Connie, after a friend of mine. You're much of a muchness I think.

She paused and her smile was like an axe. Swift.

– But you won't quote scripture at me.

* * *

_Kia ora, lovely reading person, you may have noticed this isn't much of a story. It's like this. _

_Most of this year I was travelling, and at one point I went on a road trip of epicness through the ... Mideast of the States (is that a thing?). Me being me, my immediate thought was that I had to turn these experiences into a story._

_I realised a couple of days ago that I already had a protagonist, the girl with no name from 'Iron Shoes', the 11th One that FAILed. And then I further realised that the type of long rambly tale of uncertain length and structure I wanted to tell wasn't really suited to fanfiction but another digital medium._

_So this is less a story and more an invitation. Above are the first two entries of _the song of the open road_ which can be found at (if you remove the spaces)_

_ thegirlwith-noname. tumblr. com_

_I don't know what I'm doing or where I'm going with it but for now I'm posting at least one thing per day. It's also interactive to a degree: you don't have to be signed up to tumblr to ask questions or submit posts if you feel like it._

_There will be more story-stories; this is just a fun experiment._

_Love,  
Clar_


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